How to Setup Nameservers for Your New Server

This tutorial is strictly for anyone who is using a dedicated server or a VPS. (Anyone else using a shared server can simply use their web hosting service's supplied nameservers - they have it easy!)

When you first set up your server, you have to give it a name, and it comes in the form of a domain name, such as "server.mydomainname.com."

Servers need two nameservers to be set (NS1 and NS2), and you'll have to make them coincide with each other on both the domain account and the actual server account. On your server, you should have two nameservers set up for you by your web host (in rare cases where they are not, you'll want to consult them on how to create these, as the process varies depending on your server setup).

Here's how you can find them: if you have software like cPanel, simply go to "Networking Setup" and look for the "Nameserver IPs" option. Click it, and you'll see the IP addresses for your ns1 and ns2 value. Write these down.

Now that you have those IP addresses, go into your domain name -- in this example, Godaddy -- and add a NS1 and NS2 under the "Host Summary" section. Once again, this would be for the domain name that your server was named after (we've named it mydomainname.com as an example, before).

For NS1, add the IP address for NS1 that you saw on your server within the "Host IP 1" section. For NS2, add the IP address for NS2 that you saw on your server, also within the "Host IP 1" section.

You've successfully set up your nameservers. Now, you can use ns1.mydomainname.com and ns2.mydomainname.com as the nameservers for all of your other domain names, so that they'll point to your server when typed in!

Now that the nameservers are set up, all you have to do whenever you want to create a new website with a new domain name is to simply set those new domains' nameservers to "ns1.mydomainname.com" and "ns2.mydomainname.com."

Remember, all you need are NS1 and NS2. Once you set these nameservers to your domain name (in my example on the right, I set them to Parked.com's nameservers), the domain name will point directly to your server, and to the account you've set up for it.

You'll only need to create nameservers for one domain name (the domain that the server will be named after), never any others. Once this is done, you can simply set those two nameservers to every other domain name you'll be pointing to a server account.