Hi, I recently setup a VPS. I added new name servers at my registrar and then changed the dns to match. I realize that it should take 24 to 48 + hours to propagate, but shouldn't my old site still be available during that time? It's not. I haven't canceled the account or anything. Is this normal or is something wrong with my VPS setup already?

You should be able to get into the old one with the IP address in any case.

yup.. IP should still work for the old one.. Typically, if you are not able to get into the old one, The new one might have been propagated already, so the new one should work. Make sure you setup the name servers properly.

If the IP's for the nameservers are on different continents, there might be a downtime.

Thanks Lotr,

Yeah, it turned out my DNS zone file was incorrect for my main account on my VPS. Two things were wrong, maybe this will help someone else later.

1. My host name is 'host' - so host.mydomain.com
I had an A record for host.mydomain.com but I only needed an A record for 'host'.

2. I didn't have A records for the name server prefixes,

ns1 IN A, ns2 IN A etc. pointing to the correct IPs. There was no information on setting this up but support helped me out and all is working now!