Very good point Suzanne! I guess I just assumed that if he built with CC software that it would have index.html as his home page.

By the time I get home from the supermarket I have a domain ready hosted etc upload. files boom done all in about 2 hours from making payment as it is a long way to the supermarket
When I am home log into my cpanel there is my new domain on my hosting stuff ( they call it an add on domain) set up some stuff, download to my FTP folder, when everything is loaded drag and drop to the new domain,. Ready online now as you say maybe only here in Indonesia not worldwide but then I wouldn't know unless I hop on a plane to Singapore to check it ????

Very interesting I believe you for sure! Just doesn't make sense to everything I know about server replication. There must be some very fast servers in Indonesia!

Hahaha well if there is they are probably the only things over here that are fast

But enough said about that,
One thing I can say is that even if he doesn't have the main page "index.html" then it should still show a sort of list, showing any other pages in the domain ? (thats my experience from here, which I often do by deleting the index page, first, before uploading new files (sort of helps with the cache problems)

Secondly there seems to be a problem with his old domain & hosting service, (message from hosting service appears) which is non of my business but which makes one wonder if he bought the new domain name from them, then they wouldn't display it, or has he just bought a domain name & not yet got it hosted anywhere?

I don't think these delays have anything to do with server replication. Probably your provider has set the sync interval for your DNS record to a value of 24 hours or even longer. Every tiny or big change of DNS settings (DNS record) needs to be sync'd with the DNS server of the TopLevelDomain authority ( for .com or .net or .nl,.......).
Usually your provider allows you to temporarily change the sync interval for your domain. Providers don't like short sync intervals because it increases the load on their servers.
So, depending on the settings a new website could be live and accessible within seconds all over the world.
Providers will usually not replicate your website to other webservers unless they experience high demand for your website.

Ed,
When you buy a domain you have to configure it in the place where you bought it, this means giving it the dns. To do this you must host your domain, that is, you must have (buy) web space. Once this is done, you must indicate to the web server that you have a domain and that you want to register it, some servers such as bluehost will give you the dns and while you have not delivered these dns to the place where you bought the domain, it will not let you register as it will check if you put the domains where you say your domain is. If you deliver them to your local or purchased NIC, bluehost will detect this situation and allow registration. Once this is done, if you go to your domain on the internet, the answer can be negative or positive, it is negative when you do not locate it, which indicates that it has not yet spread on the web and it is positive when a Linux message appears. You must upload an index.html file via FTP and call it, if you can see it all is fine.