Your Domain Registrar Does Not Have to Run Your DNS
If you bought your domain from a registrar such as GoDaddy, Namecheap or xneelo, that company may also have set up your DNS automatically and included it at no extra cost. You do not have to use the registrar for your DNS. Choosing where your domain’s DNS is hosted is an important step.
DNS stands for Domain Name System. It is the system that tells the internet where to find the services associated with your domain — your website, email, APIs, applications on subdomains and other online services.
Your nameservers decide who hosts your DNS
Every domain has authoritative nameservers. These tell the rest of the internet where to find the DNS records for your domain.
In the DNS configuration, these are identified by records of type NS, short for Name Server. The NS records identify the servers that are authoritative for your domain and therefore tell the internet where its DNS is hosted.
When you buy a domain, the registrar will normally configure its own nameservers for you. This makes getting started easy, but it does not tie your DNS to that registrar.
You can keep your domain registered and renewed with the same company while changing its nameservers to a specialist DNS provider such as Cloudflare or Amazon Route 53.
DNS is critical infrastructure
For many domains, the free DNS supplied by a registrar will work perfectly well. But it is worth understanding just how much depends on the nameservers you choose.
Your domain’s authoritative nameservers are where the internet goes to find its DNS records. If those nameservers become unavailable, the internet may no longer be able to discover where any of your services are located.
That can affect everything using the domain — your website, email, APIs and applications on subdomains — even when all of those services are themselves running normally.
This gives the DNS provider a surprisingly large blast radius. A failure in one relatively small piece of infrastructure can make many otherwise independent services appear to have failed.
That is why the choice of authoritative DNS provider deserves some thought. Reliability, resilience, security controls and good operational tooling matter.
The point is not that DNS supplied by a registrar is necessarily bad. It is that the registrar and DNS provider perform different jobs, and there is no reason they have to be the same company.
This is a common approach
Cloudflare and Amazon are leading DNS providers among the world’s most popular websites. W3Techs, which ranks websites by popularity, reports that Cloudflare provides DNS for 44.9% of the top 1,000 sites, while Amazon provides DNS for 21.1%. Their shares across all websites are considerably smaller, at 18.5% and 3.4% respectively. GoDaddy presents the reverse picture: it provides DNS for nearly one in ten websites overall, but just one in a thousand among the top 1,000.
| DNS provider | Top 1,000 | Top 10,000 | Top 100,000 | All websites |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 44.9% | 43.8% | 43.7% | 18.5% |
| Amazon | 21.1% | 21.4% | 16.9% | 3.4% |
| GoDaddy Group | 0.1% | 1.3% | 3.4% | 9.9% |
| Hostinger | 0.0% | 0.3% | 1.0% | 4.6% |
| Namecheap Group | 0.3% | 0.5% | 0.8% | 1.9% |
Source: W3Techs, DNS-provider usage by website popularity, 12 September 2026, with individual breakdowns for Amazon and Namecheap Group. Selected providers; percentages rounded to one decimal place.
A small company can make the same infrastructure choice. Cloudflare and Amazon Route 53 are available without moving the domain registration: the registrar can continue looking after the domain, while a different provider runs its DNS.
Stripe provides a good example. Its domain is registered through SafeNames, while its authoritative nameservers are provided by Amazon Route 53.
Xero does much the same thing: its domain is registered through CSC Corporate Domains, while its authoritative nameservers are also provided by Amazon Route 53.
We followed the same approach with megargy.com. We originally registered the domain with GoDaddy but chose Amazon Route 53 to host its DNS. More recently, we moved the domain registration to Amazon as well, simply for the convenience of keeping the registration and DNS in one place.
In each case, the important point is that the registrar and the DNS provider were separate choices. They can ultimately be the same company, but they do not have to be.
Changing nameservers
Moving DNS providers does require some care. Before changing the nameservers, the DNS records for your website, email, applications and other services need to be recreated at the new provider. DNSSEC also needs to be handled correctly if it is enabled.
Once that is done, your registrar can continue doing what it was originally chosen to do: maintain the registration of your domain.
Where you register your domain and where you host its DNS are two separate choices. It is worth making both deliberately.