Find authoritative Name Servers for any domain. Identify DNS providers, check nameserver configuration and TTL values.
Name Server (NS) records delegate a DNS zone to a set of authoritative nameservers. When a recursive resolver looks up example.com, it first queries the .com TLD servers which respond with the NS records pointing to the authoritative nameservers for that domain.
The nameservers listed in NS records hold the definitive DNS zone data for a domain — A, AAAA, MX, TXT, CNAME records, and more.
Changing NS records takes 24–48 hours to propagate globally because old nameserver data is cached by recursive resolvers until TTL expires.
NS records are included in DNSSEC chain-of-trust. The parent zone signs a DS record that corresponds to the KSK at the child zone's nameservers.
Domains should have at least two NS records on geographically and topologically separate servers to survive nameserver outages.
Multiple nameservers provide redundancy. If one goes offline, DNS resolution continues using the others. Most registrars require at least two.
A lame delegation occurs when the NS records point to a server that is not actually configured to answer authoritatively for the domain. This causes DNS resolution failures.