Custom Name Servers

I would think that most people don’t really think about customizing their name servers. Reason being its not really necessary and to basic a website admin not worth the time to learn. So what are name servers? The technical way to describe them is:

A name server is a specialized server on the Internet that handles queries or questions from your local computer, about the location of a domain name’s various services. A great simple way to think about nameservers is using a phone book analogy.

picture from laservers.com

So in layman’s  most domains us name servers to direct traffic to their hosting account from their domain name. Setting them is not really to difficult. It may be a little bit nerdy, but I think customizing them are cool. Example if you do a whois look up on my domain: DorrDirectory.com. You will see that my servers are ns1 and ns2 .dorrdirectory.com.  A lot of larger companies use this like Facebook and Google. You can do this too. If your hosting with say bluehost or hostmonster, they will tell you point your domain to ns1 and ns2 whatever. What you will need to is do an A record search on each one to get an ip address, then in your hosting account setup ns1 and ns2 with your domain and match the ips of your hosting account.

So you are all set on the hosting side of it now for the registrar. I primarily deal with Go daddy, fairly cheap, ok support, and a good user interface. You will want to go to the hostname section and setup your domains ns1 to ns2 to your hosts ips. Just like setting up the A records. Lastly you will want to point your domain to the custom name servers you setup. I know this post is little vague, but if you have good understanding of domains and hosting this should make sense. If not and you have questions please feel free comment below.