How Can I Tell When My DNS Was Last Updated?

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InMotionFans
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I'm going crazy! My site is down, and I'm looking at your article here:

Why is my Website Down? - https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/website-unavailable/why-is-my-website-down


... but it's like a dead end. You tell me what to do, but not how. Ug...


Ok, enough venting.


The article talks about DNS and propagation. How do I find out the last time my DNS was changed? Obviously, if I changed it, I would remember lol. But, I work with a team of about 5 designers / developers, and I don't always know what it is they're up to! (yeah, what a pain that is! lol)


Again, how can I check when DNS record was changed?

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JacobIMH

Hello, and thanks for your question about how to check when a DNS record was changed. Sorry for the issues you've been experiencing and that the article you read didn't spell out exactly how to investigate the problems you're seeing. If you can let us know the domain you're having issues with, we'd be glad to take a look for you.

The easiest way is to take a look at the domain's Updated Date by doing a WHOIS Lookup.

Another, more-detailed option is to look at the last time your website's DNS was updated using an online DNS lookup tool, or by using the built-in nslookup command on Windows.

Check When DNS Record Was Changed Using the nslookup Command on Windows

  1. Click on the Start or search button
  2. In the Search Programs and Files box type cmd or open the Windows Terminal on Windows 11
  3. Once the command prompt window is opened, type in the following command: 
    nslookup -q=SOA inmotionhosting.com
    Now you'll get back the SOA record for the domain you queried, in this case I used inmotionhosting.com.Then, it will return the serial entry which would look like this: 
    Non-authoritative answer:
inmotionhosting.com
        primary name server = ns1.inmotionhosting.com
        responsible mail addr = webserver.inmotionhosting.com
        serial  = 2013100403
        refresh = 28800 (8 hours)
        retry   = 600 (10 mins)
        expire  = 3600000 (41 days 16 hours)
        default TTL = 86400 (1 day)

A DNS SOA serial can be read as the time-stamp when the DNS records were last seen to be updated. In this case our:

2013100403

Breaks down to:

2013/10/04 - 03

So our latest DNS record update was actually today October 4th, 2013, and it was the 3rd update today indicated by the 03 at the end of the time-stamp.

Now the only other important thing to keep in mind is if you recently changed your name servers. As this can take up to 48 hours to fully propagate, and your computer might be using a different name server than you updated to.

You can also specify a name server to query with the same nslookup command like so:

nslookup inmotionhosting.com ns1.inmotionhosting.com

So in this case you can see that I'm directly asking our name server ns1.inmotionhosting.com for the DNS records for our domain. If you had your domain previously using another name server and now you can't get to the website, you should see if you get a different response for:

nslookup example.com ns1.inmotionhosting.com

Or:

nslookup example.com

If you're getting back a different IP address, then that means your computer hasn't fully propagated to pull from our name servers for your domain.

I hope that helps clear things up a bit, if you still had any further questions at all please let us know!

- Jacob