apologies if this has been asked before - I am relatively new to web design.

I live in the UK and use 123-reg as my hosting company.

When I upload new content to my site via my home aol account there is a big delay in the site updating to show the new material - I mean sometimes a week or more.

Is this a common thing? Is it avoidable?

It sounds like somewhere, it's being cached. If I recall correctly, AOL has some form of caching on their servers (and please don't hold me to this because I'm not sure) designed to speed up the user experience.

The downside to caching is that it delays updates, as you've seen.

My suggestion would be to try uploading it from a different ISP that has no caching (any cable or DSL provider should be fine in this regard) and see what happens.

This actually seems like it would be more of a local cache problem than one with your ISP. The first thing I would suggest is checking your browser settings to ensure it's not serving you a cached version of your site after updates are made--it could be that your browser is only checking for updated content once weekly or something. I've seen this before.

I've dealt with this problem first hand before too. AOL is to blame. I've tried clearing the cashed files before and have had no success. However, when I visit my site using Microsoft Internet Explorer the updates are there. It takes a few days for the changes to show on AOL. Sorry I can't be of more help. I've just resigned myself to putting up with it.

cheers all!