NS lookup: find the nameservers of a domain

See which nameservers answer for a domain, and whether the NS records in DNS agree with the delegation held at the registry.

What nameservers do

Nameservers are the servers that hold the DNS records of a domain. When someone looks up your website or sends you mail, their resolver first finds out which nameservers are responsible for your domain and then asks one of them. Whoever runs those nameservers decides what every other record says, which is why the NS set is the first thing to check when DNS behaves unexpectedly.

The NS records usually reveal the DNS provider at a glance: a registrar, a CDN such as Cloudflare, a cloud provider or servers the owner runs.

Two places, one answer

A domain has nameservers listed in two places. The registry holds the delegation, which you set at your registrar. The zone itself also contains NS records, served by your DNS provider. Resolvers follow the delegation to find your zone, so that is the set that actually routes traffic, but both should list the same servers.

OrbitProbe reads the delegation from the registration data and the NS records from DNS, then tells you whether they match. A mismatch is expected for a short while during a provider change. At any other time it usually means a change was made in one place and forgotten in the other.

Subdomains

A subdomain such as www or mail normally has no NS records of its own and uses the nameservers of the parent domain. It only has its own NS records when it has been delegated to different servers, which the lookup will show.

FAQ

How do I find the nameservers of a domain?

Enter the domain above. You get the NS records that public resolvers return and the nameservers recorded at the registry. From a terminal you can run dig NS example.com or nslookup -type=ns example.com.

How many nameservers should a domain have?

At least two, on different networks, so that one failure does not take the domain offline. Most DNS providers give you two to four.

Why do the registry and DNS show different nameservers?

Either a nameserver change is in progress and caches have not expired yet, or the change was made in only one of the two places. The delegation at the registry is the one resolvers follow.

How long does a nameserver change take?

The delegation is cached for as long as the parent zone says, commonly 48 hours. Keep the old zone running and identical during that time.

Can I tell who hosts a website from its nameservers?

Only the DNS provider. The website can be hosted somewhere else entirely. Use the IP and hosting lookup to see the network that serves the site.