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Clearing Your DNS Cache

When you visit a website in your browser, your computer will store information about where this website lives on the Internet, so that you do not have to look it up again. This is similar to how your browser may cache files in your temporary internet files, except it is caching a website address instead.

Sometimes the site you are looking for may move to a different IP address, and your computer may not have the latest location information about the site.

You can use the instructions below to clear your DNS cache, ensuring you have the latest location information about all the websites you visit.

Windows® 98, ME, 2000

Open the Start menu.
Go to Run.
Type: ipconfig /flushdns
Press Enter or Return, and your cache will be flushed.

Windows® XP, Vista or Windows 7

Open the Start menu.
Go to Run.
Type: ipconfig /flushdns
Type: net stop dnscache
Press Enter or Return, and your cache will be flushed.

Windows 8, 8.1, 10

1. Go to desktop and press on keyboard "Win" and "R" simultaneously.
2. In the new window enter "cmd" and press enter key.
3. You will see command line interface. Type following text:

ipconfig /flushdns

4. After that press enter. DNS cache will be cleared.

More permanent options for Windows DNS Cache

MacOS®

Go to Applications.
Go to Utilities.
Open the Terminal application.
Type: dscacheutil -flushcache
Press Enter or Return, and your cache will be flushed.

MacOS X (Leopard)

Go to Applications.
Go to Utilities.
Open the Terminal application.
Type: lookupd -flushcache
Press Enter or Return, and your cache will be flushed.

If you receive errors similar to "-bash: lookupd: command not found" on Step 4, you can try using the following command instead:

dscacheutil -flushcache

MacOS X (Mavericks)

1. Start Launchpad.
2. Type "terminal" and press enter.
3. Type following command:

dscacheutil -flushcache

Press enter. Cache will be cleared.

4. Type following command to restart local DNS server:

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

Systems will ask you for admin password. If you don't know it, you can simply reboot your PC.

Linux

Open the Command Line Interface (CLI) using PuTTY or your favorite SSH client.
Type: /etc/rc.d/init.d/nscd restart
Press Enter or Return, and your cache will be flushed.

Further information for Windows users:

You can use the Ipconfig tool to view and to flush the DNS resolver cache. To view the DNS resolver cache, type ipconfig /displaydns at a command prompt. Ipconfig displays the contents of the DNS resolver cache, including the DNS resource records that are preloaded from the Hosts file and any recently queried names that were resolved by the system. After a certain time period, the resolver discards the record from the cache. The time period is specified in the Time to Live (TTL) associated with the DNS resource record. You can also flush the cache manually. After you flush the cache, the computer must query DNS servers again for any DNS resource records previously resolved by the computer. To delete the entries in the DNS resolver cache, type ipconfig /flushdns at a command prompt.

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318803

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