Should your Nameservers be under a Different Domain

Question

I notice that, with most of the web hosts I use, they provide nameserver addresses under their main domain (or a related domain).

For example Mediatemple provides name servers which are:

1. ns1.mediatemple.net
2. ns2.mediatemple.net

So when I setup a website on their servers, under a domain like myserver.com the nameservers are not under that domain.

When I was setting up with a new host for another site, they setup nameservers under the domain of the site I was setting up. So, the website I was installing was myserver.com, they setup nameservers as ns1.myserver.com and ns2.myserver.com.

Is this best practice? Should the nameservers be associated with a different domain?

(My thoughts are that they should, otherwise you need to access the DNS records for myserver.com in order to find out where the servers which house the DNS records you just accessed are.... Sounds a bit chicken & egg to me.) Any advice or observations greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It is possible to set up nameservers for a brand new domain with names under that domain; so, example.com could (if it wasn't a reserved domain) have nameservers of ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com. Most registrars will prompt for the IP addresses to associate with the records at the time, to avoid the chicken/egg scenario.

For situations where you do not control your nameservers (i.e. you're using a hosting business in between), I wouldn't recommend registering their servers under your name (after all, they could choose to move to different IP ranges, and all of a sudden your NS records are pointing at the wrong place)