What are nameservers?

A nameserver is the machine that holds the authoritative answers about your domain: where the website is, where the mail goes, what the TXT records say.

Your domain record at the registry does not contain any of those answers. It contains a pointer: "ask these nameservers". Change the pointer and you change who is answering, which changes every answer at once.

They look like ns1.yourhost.com and ns2.yourhost.com. There are at least two for redundancy.

Less often than people think. Change nameservers when:

• You move hosting and want the new host to manage everything
• You move DNS to a specialist provider
• You set up your own branded nameservers as a reseller

Do not change nameservers when you only want to move the website and keep email where it is. That is an A record change, and confusing the two is the single most common cause of "we moved hosting and our email stopped".

1. Write down your current records first. A, CNAME, MX and TXT — screenshot them if nothing else. The new nameservers will not have them 2. Recreate the records at the new provider before you switch, especially MX and any SPF or DKIM TXT records 3. Lower the TTL a day ahead if you can, so the switch takes minutes rather than hours 4. Change the nameservers at the registrar 5. Check: load the website, send yourself an email, and send one from an outside address

The step people skip is the second one, and the symptom is mail silently bouncing for a day.

Change nameservers when

Everything is moving to one new provider and you want them to manage the lot.

Change a record when

One thing is moving. A new website with the same email: change the A record. New email with the same site: change the MX records.

Both are free, both are yours to do from the client area, and our team will set them for you if you would rather tell us what you are trying to achieve than work out which record it is.