The term “hosting” doesn't describe a particular service, but a set of services that offer a variety of functions to a domain name. Having a site and emails, for instance, are two separate services although in the general case they come together, so many people think of them as one single service. Actually, every domain has a several DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each particular service - the first one is a numeric IP address, which defines where the website for the domain address is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that handles the emails for the domain name. As an illustration, 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. When you have custom records on their end, the browser request or the e-mail will then be directed to the correct server. The idea behind using separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you can have your website hosted by one service provider and the e-mails by another.
Custom MX and A Records in Shared Web Hosting
If you have a shared web hosting account from our company and you want to point either your site or your e-mails to a different company, it's going to take you literally only 2 clicks to do it. Our Hepsia CP provides an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domain names and subdomains will be listed alphabetically and you are going to be able to see and edit the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you decide to use a different email provider and they ask you to create more MX records than the standard two, it won't take more than a couple of clicks either to add them. You can even set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the bigger the priority a certain MX record is going to have. The propagation of any record that you change or set up will not take more than several hours and if required, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which shows how long a record will remain active after it's modified or deleted.
Custom MX and A Records in Semi-dedicated Servers
With the semi-dedicated servers we offer, you are going to have 100 % control over the records of all domain names and subdomains that you add in your hosting account. You can easily check what A and MX records every one of them has through the DNS Records section of the Hepsia hosting CP and modifying any record requires just a few clicks. If you choose to switch your web or e-mail hosting provider, you can edit the necessary record and point your domain to the other service provider for one of the services, while you still continue using the other one through us. You can also keep the main domain address here, while you modify the A record of only one of its subdomains. If you're modifying the MX records and you need additional ones on top of the standard 2 that we have, you can create them with ease and set a different priority for every single one.