TTL (time to live) is the DNS setting that decides how long the internet remembers an old address after you change it. Migration speed lives here.
What TTL does Every DNS answer is cached by resolvers worldwide for TTL seconds. TTL 3600 = the world may serve the old answer for up to an hour after your change. TTL 300 = five minutes. The setting is a freshness-vs-load tradeoff: low TTL means more resolver queries; high TTL means slower changes.
The migration trick (the whole reason you care) 24 hours BEFORE switching hosts: 1. Lower TTL on the A/nameserver records to 300 2. Wait a day (the old, long TTL expires from caches worldwide) 3. Make the switch — the world picks up the new address within minutes 4. After a stable week: raise TTL back to 3600 (fewer queries, faster normal resolution) Skipping the pre-lowering is why some migrations 'take 48 hours' — the world was still holding the old 24–48h TTL answer.
Standard values - Stable records: 3600 (1 hour) — the everyday default - Pre-migration: 300–600 - Testing/experiments: 60–120 (temporarily) - MX records: 3600 normally; lower before mail migrations
Where to set it Your DNS panel per record (Kairalmas's DNS page exposes it; registrar DNS panels too). One record at a time, deliberate changes only — TTL is the rare setting where patience IS the feature.
The five-minute TTL is the difference between 'migration weekend' and 'migration teacup'. Now you know which dial to turn — and when.