What is TTL?

What is TTL?

TTL stands for Time to Live. If you have a site, these values may seem meaningless to you, but they mean a lot. When you change and forward the Name Servers of your domain name, Name Server meets a DNS structure. In this structure, each value has a death time. This is the reason why, for example, the website you are moving is between the old and the new one until this death period has passed. Because the old site's TTL value has not reached the time of death yet and it still matches your old server ips.

How Should We Use TTL? What is the benefit?

When a website is called, it first goes to the name server of your domain and then to the dns set it points to, where it looks at the A record or CNAME records and matches the ip and your site opens. If there is any problem in this path, your site cannot be opened. TTL comes into play here, if short intervals are given, for example, 3600 sec. 1 hour, in this case, requesting this data from your DNS cluster again every 1 hour will cause a delay. To prevent this, we must reduce the query and increase the TTL value.

The higher the TTL value, the lower the query. So if giving the highest value is helpful, why not give them all the highest value? If you don't forward DNS operations on your site and don't change hosts all the time, yes it might make sense. If you are changing DNS very often, you should keep these values low and minimize the death times.

How Fast Does TTL Speed Up My Site?

TTL is effective if you enter a site that has never been visited before. At the first login, your site's IP address is stored in a memory according to the TTL value. TTL determines this time. This query is not made in your other entries and your entry is made directly over the existing DNS registered before. This returns you as speed, but this speed is not a speed that will make a big difference. The aim here is not to tire your DNS server and to use DNS more consciously by making fewer queries. In the short run, it provides you with fewer queries, and in the long run, it can offer a more stable site where you don't tire the DNS server of the server or host.

How should TTL be in my MX Mail settings?

In MX settings, it is very important when the servers are working with each other during TTL mail exchange, so 12 to 24 hours are recommended. Thus, for mailings made during the day, the DNS query is made only once for each domain name. If we set 1 hour and think that we work for 8 hours and send 100 mails to 10 different addresses every hour, then we would have sent our mails with 10 queries per hour, that is, a total of 800 queries per hour. Instead, we can make our e-mails reach much faster by making only 80 queries for 1 day with a TTL of 12 or 24 hours.