Vanity Nameservers: What are they and how do I set them up?

A vanity nameserver is a name server that is branded to a website of your choice, instead of our public name servers. This can make your site appear more professional, by masking the fact you’re using our name servers.

Setting up vanity name servers on shared hosting would be much different than running your own custom name servers on either a VPS or dedicated server. As these run completely separate from our public name servers.

With vanity name servers you are just hiding or masking the hostname of our public name servers, but the IP addresses and the physical servers handling your website’s DNS requests would still be our public name servers.

• Why Use Vanity Name Servers?
• Setting up Vanity Name Servers on Shared Hosting
  • Create DNS Records
  • Point Your Domain
  • Wait for Propagation

Why Use Vanity Name Servers?

When you do a Whois lookup on your domain, or if you use our domain routing tool, anyone can see the name servers that your domain name points to. For instance if your domain was example.com here is what you’d see:

Before vanity name servers:
NS1.INMOTIONHOSTING.COM
NS2.INMOTIONHOSTING.COM

After vanity name servers:
NS1.EXAMPLE.COM
NS2.EXAMPLE.COM

Using vanity name servers allows you to hide the fact that your website actually relies on our public name servers.

Setting up Vanity Name Servers on Shared Hosting

To setup vanity nameservers, you need to create two A (address) DNS records pointed at our public name server IP addresses. Typically you’ll point one for ns1 and one for ns2, followed by your domain of choice, but the DNS records you create can be anything of your choosing, so long as you also register those hosts with your domain Registrar.

Create DNS Records

The steps below go over setting up vanity name servers on the example.com domain. Be sure to use your actual domain when you follow these steps yourself.

1. Login to your cPanel.
2. Under the Domains section, click on Simple DNS Zone Editor.
3. Select your domain name from the Domain drop-down.
4. Under the Add an A Record section, fill in these values:
   Name: ns1
   Address: 74.124.210.242
   When clicking off of the Name field, it will convert to the format ns1.example.com.
5. Now click on Add a Record, you should see a success message of:
   Added Record ns1.example.com. > 74.124.210.242
6. While still in the Simple DNS Zone Editor, under the Add an A Record section, fill in these values:
   Name: ns2
   Address: 70.39.150.2
   When clicking off of the Name field, it will convert to the format ns2.example.com.
7. Now click on Add a Record, you should see a success message of:
   Added Record ns2.example.com. > 70.39.150.2
8. After that, down under the User-Defined Records section you should now see:
   ns1.example.com. A 74.124.210.242
   ns2.example.com. A 70.39.150.2

Point Your Domain

If you registered your domain name through InMotion Hosting you can use our guide on changing your domain nameservers in AMP, to switch your domain from using our public name servers to your new vanity name servers.

Otherwise you’ll need to let your domain Registrar know about the name server change, and you can follow our guides for updating nameservers for domains registered elsewhere if this is the case.

You need to let them know that you’re trying to run name servers from your domain name. This typically involves going to a section in their control panel labeled something along the lines of maintain name servers under this domain, it can also be referred to as domain hosts, or glue records.

Wait for Propagation

Once you’ve registered your new vanity name servers with your domain Registrar, it can take 24-48 hours before they become fully active. After they’ve become active you can go ahead and point any of your other domains that you have hosted with us to these newly created vanity name servers, instead of our public name servers.

Learn more about DNS management from our Managed VPS Hosting Product Guide.