How to Register Child Nameservers (Glue Records) at the Registry

A “glue record” (also called a child nameserver or host record) is what tells the domain registry — not just your own DNS zone — that a nameserver named after your own domain actually exists and what IP it lives at. Without this step, private nameservers won’t resolve for anyone outside your own DNS configuration.

Why glue records exist

Normally, resolving a nameserver’s IP just means looking up its A record via DNS, the same as any hostname. But if the nameserver’s hostname is inside the very domain it’s meant to serve DNS for (e.g. ns1.yourdomain.com serving DNS for yourdomain.com itself), you get a chicken-and-egg problem: to look up ns1.yourdomain.com‘s IP, a resolver would need to ask… yourdomain.com‘s nameservers, which is ns1.yourdomain.com itself. Glue records solve this by publishing the nameserver’s IP directly at the registry level, alongside the domain’s own record, breaking the loop.

Registering a glue record

The exact steps vary by registrar, but the pattern is consistent:

1. Log in to the registrar where the domain is registered (not necessarily your DNS/hosting provider).
2. Find a section usually called “Child Nameservers”, “Host Records”, “Glue Records”, or “Register Nameservers” (often near the domain’s own nameserver settings).
3. Add each nameserver hostname (ns1.yourdomain.com, ns2.yourdomain.com) along with its corresponding IP address.
4. Save — this registers the glue record at the registry level, separate from any DNS zone record you’ve also created.

Only needed on the domain that “owns” the nameserver name

Glue records only need to be registered on the specific domain the nameserver hostname belongs to (e.g. only on yourdomain.com for ns1.yourdomain.com) — other domains that simply use those nameservers (pointing their own NS records at ns1.yourdomain.com) don’t need their own glue records.

Verifying it worked

Use a WHOIS lookup or a tool like dig ns1.yourdomain.com from an external network after allowing time for propagation — if it resolves to the correct IP from outside your own network, the glue record is working correctly.