This is all too common to business owners that start up their website.
Most think that they have been had by their hosting provider or their site is down.
Before calling tech support you might want to know about domain propagation.
Consider this scenario: You register your domain name let's say mybusiness.
com, paid for it and you now own it.
You then buy a webhosting package from a webhosting company.
After they verify your payment, they (the hosting company) will usually send you an email with your account information such as logon name, passwords, disk quota etc.
You now check your browser to check your mybusiness.
com website..
..
but nothing pops up.
4 hours passed...
you check your website..
still nothing.
You might see a message saying "No website configured for this address".
Now you are irritated..
You call tech support.
They say that your domain name has not propagated fully yet.
I have experienced that before.
The thought of your new website...
all that stuff.
Here's what the tech support meant, your domain may not have propagated or "spread" over the Internet yet.
Domain propagation is "routine" when it comes to webhosting.
See, the Internet is composed of millions of computers interlinked together, handled by Internet Service Providers.
When you register a domain name, your registrar sends the information to the Internet Service Providers announcing that your domain exists.
Considering that there are millions of computers and thousands of ISPs plus the long hop that the information takes, it is common that you have you to wait 1 or 2 days max before your domain name is announced to all ISPs.
So that's it.
If you just bought a webhosting package and set the correct nameservers, wait a maximum of 2 days before your domain name propagates fully across the Internet.