Website content being cached somewhere?

[#1]

I have.a fixed IP and a small web server running nginx, with an SSL cert from let’s encrypt.  I’ve just updated the website and although I can see the new version of the site on port 80 (using the IP address) on the local network, if I look at the domain name, which automatically defaults to port 443, I still get the old version. 

As far as I can tell, my server isn’t caching anything, but something is. Does PN use Cloudflare or something similar as a nameserver? If so, is there any way I can get it to clear the cache? Or is there some other way of sorting this?

TIA. Mike

[#2]

After several days, whatever was caching it has now stopped, so the problem has gone away.

[#3]

Web sites can have a max-age for cache entries - if not given explicitly by the site the default tends to be of the order of 2 or 3 hours.

Web pages may be cached in many places, from your own server right through to the viewer's web browser. This is simply to minimize unnecessary traffic - since many web pages don't change frequently there is usually no need to go all the way to the hosting server for a copy of the page.

It's likely that whatever max-age was used has now passed so your pages have been updated in the cache(s). Caching won't have stopped, just been updated. 

[#4]

I get the same "problem" though it's an ordinary website and I don't run a server and it's more than annoying to have to wait several days to be able to check whether a change that I've made is done correctly. It never used to be like this and changes for instance to a Wordpress blog were more or less immediate so something has changed.

HOWEVER if instead of using my domain name I use instead ccgi.domainname.force9.co.uk any changes show straightaway so I'm not sure where the apparent caching happens.

From my point of view unless you've a completely static website it makes things useless. Luckily I've other options.

[#5]

@quelquod you should be able to specify the cache max-age for your website and thereby override any defaults. The way to specify that will depend on how you've built your website (HTML, javascript, Wordpress etc.) but should be straightforward. 

[#6]

I don't think it's strictly a caching problem because new pages don't appear either (over a week now and changes made are not visible on the www but are definitely there on the Hostopia (?) server). This isn't something I can address so I'll raise a new topic and hope that one of the Plusnet Tech support guys sees it.

[#7]

I seem to remember entries in the .htaccess file can speed up or slow down cache controls.