SiteHost

Name Servers

A name server translates domain names into IP addresses and other information. This makes it possible for a user to access a website by typing in the domain name instead of the IP address of the server that hosts it. For example, when you visit https://sitehost.nz/ in your browser, it looks up the 'A record' for sitehost.nz via the domain's name servers to obtain the IP address of our web server and then connects to that address to show you our website. Similarly, email addressed to support@sitehost.nz reaches our mail server by looking up its hostname in the 'MX record' on our domain.

Each domain name must have at least two name servers listed when the domain is registered. One name server is used as the 'primary' name server, while the rest are used as a backups in case the primary name server is unresponsive.

SiteHost Name Servers

We have four name servers available for use by customers:

Hostname IPv4 Address IPv6 Address
ns1.sitehost.co.nz 223.165.67.4 2403:7000:4000:c00::4
ns2.sitehost.co.nz 120.138.23.11 2403:7000:4000:100::e
ns3.sitehost.co.nz 103.197.54.244 2407:9d00:20::5
ns4.sitehost.co.nz 103.197.52.247 2407:9d00:10::1d

These name servers are used by default for domains registered with us and are required if you wish to administer the DNS records for a domain using the Control Panel.

To check if you are using our default name servers, visit the 'Name Servers' tab for your domain in the Control Panel. If the 'DNS Provider' is set to 'SiteHost', you're good to go:

A domain using our default name servers

For those comfortable with the terminal, you can also check with the whois command:

$ whois sitehost.co.nz | grep 'Name Server:'
Name Server: ns1.sitehost.co.nz
Name Server: ns2.sitehost.co.nz
Name Server: ns3.sitehost.co.nz
Name Server: ns4.sitehost.co.nz

Custom Name Servers

If you need to use custom name servers, choose the 'Custom' provider and enter in the name servers given by your provider.

Make sure all the necessary records are set up with your custom provider before changing your name servers. Failure to do so may make your website inaccessible or impact email deliverability to your domain.

For example, Cloudflare will ask that you use a pair of name servers such as nick.ns.cloudflare.com and meera.ns.cloudflare, in which case you should set your custom provider like so:

A domain using custom name servers

Glue Records

If you want your domain to use name servers hosted under that same domain, you'll also need to provide the A records (and/or AAAA records) for your name servers, which are called glue. In short, this is to break a circular dependency where the records for your domain depend on the hostnames of your name servers, but their hostnames depend on the name servers for your domain (see this Wikipedia article for more details).

For example, suppose we want to use the name servers below for example.com:

Hostname IPv4 Address IPv6 Address
ns1.example.com 203.0.113.1 2001:db8:3d7f:6a1::01
ns2.example.com 203.0.113.2 2001:db8:3d7f:6a1::02

Because ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com are subdomains of example.com, we'll need to provide glue in the form of A and AAAA records. Input boxes to do so should automatically appear once you choose 'Custom' under 'DNS Provider' and enter in their hostnames:

A domain using custom name servers with glue

If your name servers only have IPv4 addresses, you may omit IPv6 addresses, and vice versa. This means you can only use IPv6 addresses, but we recommend ensuring that your name servers all have IPv4 addresses for maximal interoperability.