The word “hosting” doesn't describe just one service, but several services that offer numerous functions to a domain. Having a site and e-mails, for instance, are two independent services although in the general case they come together, so most people think of them as one single service. In fact, each domain has a several 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 specifies where the website for the domain name is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that handles the emails for the domain address. For example, an A record can be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record can be mx1.domain.com. Each time you open a site or send an e-mail, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a domain has and the traffic/message is first forwarded to that company. In case you have custom records on their end, the Internet browser request or the email will then be directed to the correct server. The concept behind employing separate records is that the two services employ different web protocols and you can have your website hosted by one company and the e-mails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Web Hosting

If you have a web hosting account through our company and you would like to direct either your site or your emails to a different provider, it's going to take you literally just 2 clicks to do so. Our Hepsia Control Panel comes with an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domains and subdomains will be listed alphabetically and you will be able to see and change the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you decide to use a different e-mail provider and they ask you to create more MX records than the default 2, it won't take more than a few mouse clicks either to add them. You can even 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 any record that you modify or create is not going to take more than several hours and if necessary, you will also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, that indicates how long a record will remain active after it is modified or deleted.