Question regarding Domain pointers

[scraf]

Hi all,

I was in a massive hurry when I set up a reseller account, so didn't really have the time to do things properly.

Now I have the time to clean up a bit.

Anyway, I have made two user accounts for one user, because they wanted two url's.

So I have user1, with www.site1.com and user2 with www.site2.com.

www.site2.com has a (Edit:301)303 redirect to www.site1.com.

Now I want to only have one user, so I can delete the user2 account and then add www.site2.com as a domain pointer to www.site1.com.

My question, will that take 72 hours to take effect? for dns propagation?

I have tried to use the domain pointer to point www.site2.com to www.site1.com , but I get a ...

Unable to add domain pointer

Details

You cannot use that domain as a pointer. It already exists on the server

.... message.

So I have to delete user2, will that therefore create downtime for www.site2.com.?

I hope I have explained myself coherently here.

 

[Aspegic]

As far as I know:

Assuming www.site1.com and www.site2.com currently point to the same IP address, the modification should not cause any downtime (at least not more than the few minutes it will take you to delete the site2 account and create the domain pointer).
It won't cause downtime because as far as dns is concerned, nothing changes, so the normal time it takes for dns changes to propagate through the internet doesn't apply here. Even dns servers that still have the old information in their cache will still return the same IP address because it hasn't changed (it's still pointing to the same server as before).
The other changes resulting from deleting the current site2 account and replacing it with a domain pointer, are changes on your server only that don't need to 'propagate' to other servers.

 

[scraf]

Thanks Aspegic, you gave me the confidence to try things out, domain pointers, redirects, and new domains.

What had thrown me off in the first place was that my www.site2.com url hadn't been registered yet, do'h.

Indeed no downtime, well there actually is, there's about 10 seconds waiting for the domain redirect to take hold.