Delegating a domain


"I have an account - now what?"


1. Get a domain

You can only use SERVFAIL with domains of your own; We're not a subdomain broker, and we don't provide any similar services - you bring the domains, we bring the nameservers.

Getting a domain will likely end up with a payment of a small, yearly fee for it. To check how specific domain registrars compare, we recommend tld-list

Of note, you can get (sub)domains for free! If one of your friends has a cool domain, ask them if they'd be willing to set NS records for you, delegating the zone to SERVFAIL. This way you can manage it like your own, and it's completely free! Ask your friends <3

2. Delegate the domain

Most registrars nowadays will provide you with their own nameservers (often called "NS Zone" or similar), most of which have horrendous UI and really poor interoperability. Right next to them, there should be an option called "NS Servers", where you can point it to Project SERVFAIL servers.

You can pick either all of our servers or a select few. The geographical location doesn't matter that much, because your clients will almost never connect directly to our servers, instead heading to resolvers which will cache the response. This is therefore mostly a pick of preference, and to some extent, a pick of trust to the admins.

Delegation quirks

3. Setting up your zone

What is what?

If this is your first time setting up a domain - firstly, don't panic. Secondly - there's a lot of complexity in DNS that you don't need to care about. At the beginning:

  1. Setup an A record with your server's IPv4. If you don't have the luxury of a static IP address, look into our DynDNS functionality
  2. If you're doing dual-stack IPv4 + IPv6 (you should! 🥰) then also set up an AAAA record

Moving from other providers

If your previous provider has a "BIND-compatible export" or just "zone export" option, try downloading that and pasting it into our "edit raw" view. Important: copy only records you want to move; It's imperative not to copy NS and SOA records, as that would mess with your zone's availability.

If your provider doesn't have an option like this, your best bet is to enter the records one by one.

4. Wait

Your zone will take quite some time before it first gets delegated to us. It usually takes around 6 to 12 hours before everything changes servers, but we've seen outliers up to over a day. You can monitor the current NS delegations using whois and dig. If neither of those changes after a day, it may be a good idea to check whether your registrar has actually forwarded the request.

After the first wait, changes should go through a bit faster. Our default Time-To-Live (TTL) is set to 3600 seconds (one hour), but you're free to lower it to as low as 300.