iFastHostingHow to use external DNS with your hosting
Keeping DNS with a third-party service while your website stays hosted with us, and the one detail that trips people up when doing it.
Your DNS does not have to be managed with either your registrar or your host. Plenty of people run a domain registered with one company, DNS managed by a dedicated third-party DNS service, and the website hosted with us — three separate companies, each doing one job. This is entirely normal and works reliably as long as the pieces are pointed at each other correctly.
Why someone chooses this setup
The usual reasons are wanting DNS features a hosting control panel does not offer — very fast propagation, detailed analytics on lookups, or advanced traffic routing — or simply wanting DNS management centralised somewhere independent of where the site happens to be hosted, so a future hosting move never touches DNS at all.
Setting it up
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Create the domain in the third-party DNS service
Most DNS providers require you to add the domain to their own system first, which typically generates a set of nameserver hostnames specific to your account with them.
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Set those nameservers at your registrar
Log in wherever the domain is registered and replace its current nameservers with the ones the DNS provider gave you. This is the step that actually hands authority over the domain's DNS to that service. See what nameservers are if this handoff is not familiar.
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Add an A record pointing at your hosting
Inside the third-party DNS service's own panel, create an A record for the domain using the IP address of your hosting account, found in your control panel or welcome email. This is the record that actually makes the website load once DNS authority has moved.
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Add MX and other records the site needs
Nameserver changes hand over the entire domain, not just the website. If email or any other service currently works on this domain, its records need to be recreated in the new DNS service too, or those services will stop working the moment the nameservers switch.
The single biggest risk in this setup is forgetting a record that currently works quietly in the background — a mail server, a domain verification for some other service, an old subdomain someone still relies on. Once nameservers change, anything not recreated in the new DNS service simply stops resolving, with no warning beforehand. Write down every existing record first.
Adding the domain to your hosting account too
Pointing an A record at your hosting's IP address is not, by itself, enough — the domain also needs to be added to your hosting account so the server knows to serve your website when a request for that domain name arrives. Do this through your control panel's domain section, separately from the DNS changes made with the third-party provider.
What happens if your hosting IP address changes
Because the connection between DNS and hosting is now a manually maintained A record rather than something your host manages automatically through its own nameservers, you are responsible for keeping that record current. If your hosting IP address ever changes — which is uncommon but can happen during certain account changes — the A record in your third-party DNS needs updating manually, since there is no longer an automatic link between the two systems.
If you are setting this up specifically because you need a guaranteed static IP address, confirm with your hosting provider that your plan includes one, rather than assuming any hosting account's address never changes.
Checking it is all connected correctly
dig +short NS yourdomain.com
dig +short A yourdomain.comThe first command should return the third-party DNS provider's nameservers; the second should return your hosting IP address. If either does not match what you expect, see how to check which DNS a domain is actually using for a fuller walkthrough of diagnosing exactly where the mismatch is.
Is this more complicated than it needs to be?
For most websites, yes — running DNS through your hosting provider's own nameservers is simpler, since adding a domain to the account and pointing its DNS at us are handled together rather than as two systems you have to keep in step manually. Third-party DNS earns its extra complexity when you have a specific reason to want it: a feature the dedicated service offers that a hosting control panel does not, or an organisational preference for keeping DNS management separate from wherever any individual site happens to be hosted. If neither applies to you, pointing a domain directly at your hosting is the simpler alternative for most sites, with one less moving part to keep synchronised over time.
If you do go ahead with a third-party DNS setup and something is not resolving as expected once everything is in place, contact our support team with the domain name — we can confirm what your hosting account is expecting to receive, even though the DNS itself sits outside our system.
Related reading
They decide who gets to answer questions about your domain — and changing them hands your whole domain to a different company.
How to add or edit an A recordWhere to find the A record setting in your DNS zone, what each field means, and how to confirm the change actually took.
How to check which DNS a domain is actually usingHow to find out, with certainty rather than a guess, which company actually controls a domain DNS right now.
How to point a domain to your hostingThe two ways to connect a domain to a hosting account, when to use each, and how to tell the change has actually taken effect.