What is a NS record?

Posted:  May 14th, 2018

 

An NS record is used to delegate a subdomain to a set of name servers. Whenever you delegate a domain to KEKhost the TLD authorities place NS records for your domain in the TLD name servers pointing to us. For example, in the com name servers there are the following entries delegating kekhost.com to our name servers:

 

kekhost.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.kekhost.com.

kekhost.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.kekhost.com.

kekhost.com. 172800 IN NS ns3.kekhost.com.

kekhost.com. 172800 IN NS ns4.kekhost.com.

 

Furthermore, An NS record or (name server record) tells recursive name servers which name servers are authoritative for a zone.  Recursive name servers look at the NS records to work out who to ask next when resolving a name.

 

You can have as many NS records as you would like in your zone file.   The benefit of having multiple NS records is the redundancy of your DNS service.  It is important to note that in order to get the most redundancy out of your NS records, they should be hosted on different network segments.  If they are not hosted on different networks segments and the network goes down, your DNS goes down with it. Check out No-IP Plus Managed DNS if you are interested in redundancy and reliability for your domain.

 

NS records help to ensure that all of the domains on your server are available at all times. Multiple NS records ensure that your customers are able to reach your site each and every time without any problems, even if one or more of your nameservers are unreachable.

 

We also automatically publish NS records in our authoritative name servers for each domain we are authoritative for. These NS records will appear in the System Records section of each domain’s Manage page, and will either be our default name servers (ns1.kekhost.com through ns4.kekhost.com) or your vanity name servers if you have vanity name servers.

 

If you would like to delegate a registered domain name to a different DNS provider, then you can do that through the domain’s Manage page. You cannot remove or change the NS records for your domain in the Advanced Editor page.