Server Setup and Private Nameservers

Server Setup (vWHM → Server Setup) is where you set the server's identity and your private nameservers — the values handed to every hosting account you create afterwards. It also controls whether this server answers DNS queries itself.

Get this page right once, before you create accounts, and every account's welcome screen tells the customer the correct nameservers.

Server identity

A read-only block at the top showing the current hostname, the detected public IP, and the operating system.

Server hostname

Sets the machine's fully-qualified hostname. Saving a new value runs hostnamectl on the server through the privileged worker.

Use a subdomain you control, such as server.yourdomain.com. Never use a domain you host for a customer — the hostname is the server's own identity and it appears in mail headers.

Two things to expect after a change: your license is bound to this server and reports its hostname, so it may need re-checking from vWHM → License — the save itself does not re-check anything — and your mail hostname changes with it. If the hostname change fails, the nameserver fields you edited in the same submit are still saved, and the error tells you the hostname specifically did not apply.

Private nameservers

Four fields, ns1 through ns4. Each must be a hostname such as ns1.yourdomain.com, or blank. ns1 and ns2 are what a working setup needs; ns3 and ns4 are optional.

These are not created for you — they are the names you are declaring. They appear:

• on every new account's confirmation screen, as the nameservers to set at the registrar
• in the zone this server writes for an account, if authoritative DNS is on

Glue records

The card at the bottom of the page lists the glue records you must create for private nameservers to work at all, each pointing at this server's IP:

ns1.yourdomain.com   A   <this server's IP>
ns2.yourdomain.com   A   <this server's IP>

Register these as host records (glue records) at the registrar of the nameserver's own domain — the domain in ns1.yourdomain.com, not the customer's domain. This is a one-time job. Until it is done, pointing a customer domain at your nameservers cannot resolve, because nothing tells the internet where your nameservers are.

The panel cannot do this step for you. It happens at your registrar.

Authoritative DNS

Vanta Panel can run its own authoritative DNS engine (PowerDNS) so your private nameservers answer queries directly from this server, with no third party involved.

If the engine is not installed, the card says so and tells you to re-run the Vanta Panel installer on this server to add it, then reload the page.

If it is installed, you get a live status block with four indicators: whether the DNS engine is installed, whether the service is running, whether port 53 is actually listening, and how many zones it hosts.

Below that is the switch that matters:

Automatically create a DNS zone for each new hosting account. With this on, creating an account writes a full authoritative zone for its domain — SOA, your NS records, an A record for the domain and for www, and MX — served from this server. The customer points their registrar at your private nameservers and DNS resolves. No Cloudflare account is needed.

Accounts created with choose a domain later are skipped, because their domain is a placeholder rather than a real one.

Terminating an account deletes its local zone again, if this option is on.

Choosing between your nameservers and Cloudflare

The two are not exclusive, and the page's closing note reflects whichever is actually true on your server.

• Authoritative DNS running here. Register the glue records, point a domain's nameservers at yours, and it resolves from this server. This is the reseller-style setup: your brand's nameservers, no external dependency.
• Authoritative DNS not running. Resolution depends on the optional Cloudflare integration or on wherever the domain's DNS already lives, and the customer adds two A records instead of changing nameservers.

The optional DNS automation Cloudflare integration stays available either way, for any domains you would rather manage there. See also Private nameservers for the customer-facing side of this.