The definition of “hosting” does not describe only one service, but several services which provide various functions to a domain address. Having a site and emails, for example, are two separate services although in the general case they come together, so most of the people consider them as one single service. Actually, each domain name has a number of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each specific service - the first one is a numeric IP address, that defines where the website for the domain name is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the e-mails for the domain address. As an illustration, an A record is 123.123.123.123 and an MX record is mx1.domain.com. Every time you open a website or send an email, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a Internet domain has and the traffic/message is first forwarded to that company. If you have custom records on their end, the browser request or the email will be forwarded to the correct server. The concept behind employing separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you may have your website hosted by one provider and the e-mails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Shared Website Hosting

If you have a shared website hosting account through our company and you want to switch either your website or your e-mails to a different service provider, it is going to take you literally just 2 clicks to do it. Our Hepsia CP provides an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domains and subdomains are going to be listed alphabetically and you'll be able to see and change the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you choose 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 few clicks either to add them. You can also set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the greater the priority a certain MX record is going to have. The propagation of each record that you change or create will not take more than a few hours and if required, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which reveals how long a record will remain active after it is changed or deleted.