Your company’s name is on everything… your domain, t-shirts, pens… So why not your nameservers?
Your brand is 100% dependent on your nameservers to stay online. They store all of your DNS records and tell users where your website is hosted when they enter your domain name into their browser.
Okay but how often will anyone see your nameservers? The average user isn’t going to run a dig before they decide to use your product.
It’s purely for vanity’s sake. That’s why we call this service Vanity DNS. You may have also heard it called vanity nameservers, DNS branding, or white-label DNS. They’re all the same and are a great way to show off how vain you are.
Still doubtful? Here are three more reasons:
- Because it looks cool. If you’ve ever lived in the USA, you know how cool vanity license plates are. You can say so much (or little) about yourself with 7-8 characters.
- Because it’s free. Yep, that’s right. All it takes is a little elbow grease and you can slap your name onto your DNS provider’s nameservers.
- For security reasons. Maybe you don’t want people knowing where your DNS records are hosted. Or perhaps you are a reseller or MSP and you want to make it appear as if your DNS services are your own.
How to Set Up Vanity Nameservers
Hopefully, by this point you’re sold on the awesomeness of Vanity DNS and want to set it up yourself. You’re in luck, we’ll show you how in just a few steps.
You will need to have access to your DNS provider’s control panel and be able to modify the DNS records for your domain.
Step 1
Gather the IP addresses of your current name servers. Learn how to find your nameservers’ IP addresses in DNS Made Easy.
Step 2
Create A (IPv4) or AAAA (IPv6) records for each nameserver. You will point each record to an IP address you gathered in the previous step.
Choose a hostname for your nameservers, such as ‘ns1.mydomain.com’. Most people name these records ‘ns1’ or ‘ns01’ which will be prepended to your domain like ‘ns1.mydomain.com’. But you can name your nameservers whatever you want.
Step 3
Enable Vanity DNS services through your DNS provider. Here is how you do it in DNS Made Easy.
You will need to create a Vanity DNS configuration which will take the hostnames we created earlier and map those to your DNS provider’s nameservers.
This step will automatically update your NS records to show your vanity hostnames instead of your DNS provider’s nameservers.
Step 4
Apply your Vanity DNS configuration to your domain. Learn how in DNS Made Easy.
Step 5
You will need to tell your registrar that you are using new nameservers. This step must be completed through your registrar’s control panel. Your registrar is the company where you purchased your domain name.
Update your nameserver values at your registrar to match the hostnames you created in the previous step, ie: ns1.mydomain.com.
And you’re done!
Your custom hostnames will now appear to the world as your nameservers, which in turn, map back to your DNS provider’s nameservers.
You can use Vanity DNS with secondary and mail nameservers, too!
Also published on Medium.
