What Are NS Records? Authoritative DNS and Nameservers Explained

Name Server (NS) DNS records specify which DNS servers are authoritative for a domain name. They dictate where internet routers and resolvers look to find all other records (A, AAAA, MX, TXT) for that domain.

How NS Delegation Works

When a user visits example.com:

1. The browser queries root DNS servers, which point to .com TLD servers.
2. The TLD servers return the authoritative NS records registered for example.com (e.g., ns1.cloudflare.com).
3. The resolver queries those authoritative nameservers to get the final IP address.

Popular DNS Hosts & Nameservers

• Cloudflare: *.ns.cloudflare.com
• AWS Route 53: ns-*.awsdns-*.com
• Google Cloud DNS: ns-cloud-*.googledomains.com
• Vercel DNS: ns1.vercel-dns.com

Free NS Lookup Tool

Check authoritative nameservers and detect your domain's DNS host with our free NS Record Lookup tool.

title: "What Are NS Records? Authoritative DNS Nameservers Explained" description: "Learn how NS records delegate DNS authority and identify the nameservers serving a domain." date: "2026-08-12" author: "DevTools" tags: ["dns", "ns", "nameservers"] relatedTools:

• name: "NS Lookup" href: "/ns-lookup"