Changing to custom nameservers

[anters]

I'm moving one of my sites to a new VPS hosting company and they told me to change the name servers to my own domain like ns1. example.com. This is new to me. In the past I've always used the hosting company nameservers like ns1. hostingcompany.com. Do I need to do anything besides replacing the nameserver field at my domain registrar for this to work?

[robzilla]

If it's a VPS with a control panel (like cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin), the idea is probably that this way you can manage your domain's DNS settings from within that control panel, and that all relevant records are automatically created by the control panel. Crucially, you will first have to register your new nameservers through your domain registrar (which passes them on to the root servers), using two domain names (e.g. ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com) and their corresponding IP addresses. Strictly speaking, you cannot use the same IP address for both of these nameservers, and hosting companies are often (or should be) reluctant to provide an additional IP address because it's a waste of limited IPv4 space. After all, if the IP connects to the same server, it doesn't add any redundancy.

You could still use other nameservers instead, of course, like your registrar's, or a third party's.