When you update your nameservers, it will just happen. You just need to wait it out. Usually it takes only an hour or so. Although I have had some take overnight to propagate.

Here's the deal.

A DNS entry has a time associated with it. It can be low, like 5 minutes, or it can be long, like 2 days.

Let's say you are on an ISP like Time Warner and you use their name servers for surfing. If you visit your site, TW will record the DNS entry in their local cache so other TW users that request the same website will get the resolution right away, and they store that up to the time specified by the refresh rate time in your DNS entry.

If you have a refresh rate of 2 days and you visit your website (recording an entry in the DNS cache of your ISP), then you change your DNS info, you and everyone else on your ISP will probably have to wait out the remainder of those 2 days before the cache refreshes. At the same time, another ISP that has no cache entry for your site will probably get it immediately.

That's what is usually meant by propagation. When I was in hosting we used to poll different DNS servers to monitor DNS propagation among larger ISPs.

If your site is small with little traffic your DNS will probably change quickly. For a future note, if your registrar has a total domain control solution, or if you host your own DNS servers, and you can specify the refresh time, then a couple days before you move set the refresh all the way down to 15 minutes or so and you'll speed that propagation right along. That way it won't take more than about 15 minutes (all things being equal) for anyone to get the update. Two days later you change it back to a normal refresh rate.

Hope that helps.

Your hosts servers will certainly need to know that you've changed to DNS to point to them so they can configure their servers to handle your domain. They'll have a help file somewhere to help you with that.

I'm assuming that you have a resellers account or the equivalent where you have a Web Host Manager (WHM)? If so then the answer is yes, you need to log into WHM and create a new account for the domain. You will need to assign a "package" to the domain, the "package" is an entity you create yourself to specify the allocated bandwidth and storage space.

The propagation time these days seems to be a lot faster than a few years ago, I seldom wait more than 15 minutes before my new domain is active.

Bill