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Thanks! Do you know why the name servers are part of the WHOIS data?

Same question for SOA record. If the NS entries are used in a round-robin fashion, why is the name server present in SOA record too?

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> Do you know why the name servers are part of the WHOIS data?

The NS returned from the registrar's WHOIS server reflects the registrar's view; the NS returned from the TLD nameservers reflects the registry's view; the NS returned from the zone's authoritative nameservers reflects the registrant's view. These should typically be the same, but can differ.

> why is the name server present in SOA record too?

The NS in the SOA record is used for RFC2136 dynamic updates and RFC1996 zone replication.

That's the clearest explanation I've ever seen, thanks.

If you're trying to debug why a website's setup isn't working, the first step is to see if what the registry thinks the nameservers should be matches what the nameservers in DNS actually are. These can fall out of sync if e.g. the registry's connection to its DNS provider is experiencing issues. This does actually happen from time to time.

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