Nameserver Lookup

Find the authoritative nameservers of a domain.

Nameserver Lookup

Find the authoritative nameservers (NS records) of any domain. Enter a domain such as example.com and the tool shows which DNS servers host its zone — the servers that hold the definitive answers for every other record of that domain.

What nameservers do

The domain name system is a delegation tree. The .com registry does not store your website's address; it only stores NS records saying which nameservers are responsible for example.com. Resolvers follow that delegation and ask those nameservers for A, MX, TXT and other records. Whoever operates the nameservers — your registrar, a DNS host like Cloudflare, Route 53, or your web host — controls the domain's DNS.

Why check nameservers?

  • After registering or transferring a domain: confirm the delegation points to the DNS provider you configured.
  • Before editing records: make sure you edit the zone at the provider that is actually authoritative; changes made elsewhere have no effect.
  • Identifying providers: names like *.ns.cloudflare.com, ns-*.awsdns-*.com, ns1.digitalocean.com or dns1.registrar-servers.com reveal who hosts the zone.
  • Troubleshooting outages: if a site and its e-mail fail together, a broken or expired delegation is a likely cause.

Lame delegation and other problems

Every listed nameserver should answer authoritatively for the domain. A "lame" nameserver that is listed but no longer serves the zone causes intermittent failures. Resolve each nameserver with Hostname to IP to be sure it exists, and use the DNS Lookup to compare the SOA serial they publish. For mail-related checks, see the MX Lookup.

Frequently Asked Questions

Changing nameservers happens at the registry, and the parent zone's NS records usually carry a TTL of up to 48 hours. Most resolvers pick up the change within a few hours, but plan for up to two days.

Registries require at least two for redundancy. If one nameserver is down, resolvers query the others. Ideally they sit on different networks so a single outage cannot take the domain offline.

Only if the subdomain is delegated to its own nameservers. Otherwise the query returns no NS records, because the subdomain is served by its parent zone.