The term “hosting” does not describe a particular service, but several services which offer different functions to a domain address. Having a website and e-mails, as an example, are two independent services despite the fact that in the general case they come together, so most people see them as one single service. In fact, every single domain has a couple of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that handles each specific service - the former is a numeric IP address, that defines where the site for the domain name is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the emails for the domain name. For example, an A record can be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record would be mx1.domain.com. Whenever you open a site or send an e-mail, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a domain name has and the traffic/message is first forwarded to that company. In case you have custom records on their end, the browser request or the email will then be directed to the correct server. The idea behind working with separate records is that the two services employ different web protocols and you can have your site hosted by one provider and the emails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Website Hosting

If you have a website hosting account through our company and you want to switch either your website or your e-mails to another company, it'll take you literally only 2 clicks to do so. Our Hepsia Control Panel provides an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domains and subdomains are going to be listed alphabetically and you're going to be able to see and change the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you want to use a different e-mail provider and they ask you to create more MX records than the default two, it's not going to take more than a couple of clicks either to add them. You could also set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the greater the priority a particular MX record will have. The propagation of any record that you modify or set up won't take more than several hours and if needed, you will also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, that reveals how long a record will remain active after it is modified or deleted.