Nameserver (NS record)
The authoritative server that holds a domain's DNS answers. NS records tell the internet which provider is in charge of them.
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What it is
A nameserver is a server that gives authoritative DNS answers for a domain. NS records at the parent zone delegate that authority: the .com zone might say that example.com's answers live at two Cloudflare nameservers. Your registrar is where you change that parent delegation; the chosen DNS provider is where you edit the domain's A, MX, TXT, and other records.
Change nameservers when moving authoritative DNS to a provider such as Cloudflare or Route 53, or use NS records inside your zone to delegate a subdomain to another team. Providers give at least two names for redundancy, and you must use the exact assigned names rather than guessing from another account.
Gotcha: changing nameservers does not copy the zone. Providers advertise an import step and it is genuinely useful, but it scans public records and cannot see what it cannot query. If the new provider ends up missing an MX or TXT record, the website keeps working while email and domain verification quietly break, which is the exact failure people spend a weekend on. When a nameserver's hostname sits inside the domain it serves, the parent also needs glue address records to avoid a lookup loop.
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Move this domain's authoritative DNS to Cloudflare without dropping traffic or email. Export the current zone, recreate every A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, CAA, and SRV record in Cloudflare, and verify answers directly against each assigned Cloudflare nameserver with dig. Then replace the registrar's delegation with the exact two nameservers Cloudflare assigned to this zone. Use 'dig NS <domain> +trace' to verify the parent delegation, and keep the old DNS zone active until the previous delegation TTL expires.