Vanity Nameservers (White-Label DNS) in 2026

When you buy a domain name, your registrar will typically offer to provide you with a collection of DNS nameservers. For most people, most of the time, that’s plenty sufficient. A trip back to 2006 My secondary domain danq.dev has three nameservers, operated by its registrar Gandi. This wasn’t always the case. In the long-distant past, I’ve registered domains for which I’ve had to run my own nameservers. Or else, where I’ve chosen to run my own nameservers in order to gain more control, or power, or just to play about with the technology inevitably break things. When I transitioned to using third-party DNS around 2006, I used to be a big fan of vanity nameservers. “Vanity nameservers” (or “white-label DNS”) is where your nameservers are hosted at subdomains of the domain for which they’re the nameserver. So instead of the nameservers for danq.me being, say, looking like ns-48-a.gandi.net and ns-228-b.gandi.net, they might look like, say, ns1.danq.me and ns2.danq.me. They might still…