Nameservers

Nameservers are DNS servers that answer DNS queries about the domains they are authoritative for. When a visitor types your domain into a browser, the DNS resolution process ↗ passes through several server types and eventually reaches the authoritative nameservers for the final answer.

In the context of Cloudflare DNS, nameservers refer to authoritative nameservers — the servers that hold the definitive DNS records for your domain and provide the final response in DNS resolution. When a nameserver is authoritative for example.com, DNS resolvers will consider responses from this nameserver when a user tries to access example.com.

Within Cloudflare, and depending on your plan, you can choose between using Cloudflare-branded nameservers or setting up your own custom nameservers. The names for Cloudflare-branded nameservers are automatically assigned and cannot be changed.

Regardless of the type you choose, for these nameservers to be authoritative for your domain, you need to update your domain nameservers, typically where you registered your domain. Updating your nameservers is required to activate your domain on Cloudflare and use most of Cloudflare's application services, such as proxying, caching, and security features.

Unless your account has a specific DNS zone defaults configuration, when you add a domain on a primary (full) or secondary DNS setup, Cloudflare automatically assigns two standard nameservers for your zone.

Standard nameservers are hosted on ns.cloudflare.com and follow the pattern <proper_name>.ns.cloudflare.com.

To know the reason behind these nameserver names, refer to our blog ↗.

Enterprise accounts on Foundation DNS have access to advanced nameservers.

Advanced nameservers are hosted on foundationdns.com, foundationdns.net, and foundationdns.org.

Each zone that uses advanced nameservers is assigned a set of three nameservers names: <color>.foundationdns.com, <color>.foundationdns.net, and <color>.foundationdns.org.

With custom nameservers, your nameservers are hosted on your own domain (or domains) and, in this sense, are not Cloudflare branded.

You provide fully qualified domain names — complete domain names like ns1.example.com — for your nameservers, and Cloudflare assigns one IPv4 and one IPv6 address to each.