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I'm currently trying to buy a VPS to host some ready-made website I have on my computer.

But I have no idea of what to write when presented with thisbox (the highlighted part)

Can someone please shed light on the significance of each column?

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    Did you try asking the company from which you buy the service? That would be a good time for yourself to judge how their support works, because when time comes when it is "business" critical to have help from them you would want to make sure their support is reactive and helpful to you, specifically as you are a beginner as you said. So maybe try asking them and see if they help?
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Mar 31, 2020 at 17:04

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NS stands for NameServer also called domain name servers (DNS). Domain names like www or example.com each have a numeric address called an Internet Protocol (IP) address. They look like 192.0.2.144 and are very user unfriendly. In order to make them friendly for users, we assign names to the numeric IP address and the Name Server converts (resolves) the name to it's IP address. For example, when you type in www.example.com in your browser, a name server converts the wwwto the numeric address transparently to the user.

Every domain must have at least one and preferably two name servers (for fault tolerance). The hostname is the name you can assign to the computer. It could be something like computer1.example.com or www.example.com or mail.example.com. You probably should use WWW since I'm guessing your trying to host a website.

Your name servers question is simply what name would you like your name servers (DNS) to be called? ns1.example.com or domainserver.example.com. NS1 and NS2 are pretty standard names for name servers that people readily recognize, so I'd just leave the names as NS1 and NS2.

Just to clarify, the prefix is simply the first part before the first period from the left. I.e., if the domain server full name is ns1.example.com, the prefix is ns1.

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    No, it doesn't help - when I order a dedicated server or VPS, I expect to get an IP address. If I don't also order a domain, what are the NS prefixes used for? Which domain would they apply to? If it refers to an existing domnain, then the NS records are already known. If it is a new domain, which one would it be, and why would it have in-zone nameservers?
    – Remember Monica
    Feb 17, 2020 at 16:49
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    This doesn't explain how the name servers are relevant to a VPS and what those fields actually do. You're buying a host, not a domain. Hostname will be the hostname of the virtual OS, but where do NS1 and NS2 prefix go?
    – Lamp
    Dec 15, 2022 at 23:19
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You need a DNS on your host to resolve domain names (and sub-domains). When some one try to access "subdomain.example.com", your DNS that handle "example.com" send you IP of example.com, now you must refer to DNS on that IP, and ask for IP of "subdomain.example.com". For your IP-base case (with no domain and sub domain) it is useless. But in Domain-Base case, sub-domains may be exist, and may be handled on other host/computer (with different IP), so a local DNS is necesarry.

Read this article to have better understand on how DNS works and what's its types What Is Recursive DNS?

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