The word “hosting” does not describe a single service, but several services which offer different functions to a domain address. Having a site and e-mails, for example, are two individual services although in the general case they come together, so most of the people consider them as one single service. In fact, every domain name has a several DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each specific service - the former is a numeric IP address, that identifies where the site for the domain address is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that deals with the emails for the domain name. For instance, an A record is 123.123.123.123 and an MX record can be mx1.domain.com. Whenever you open a site or send an email, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a domain address has and the traffic/message is first directed to that company. When you have custom records on their end, the Internet browser request or the email will be sent to the correct server. The reasoning behind employing separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you can have your site hosted by one company and the e-mail messages by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Web Hosting

If you have a web hosting account through our company and you wish to point either your site or your emails to a different service provider, it's going to take you literally simply two clicks to do it. Our Hepsia Control Panel comes with 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 want to use a different email provider and they ask you to create more MX records than the default 2, it is not going to take more than a couple of mouse clicks either to add them. Also you can set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the greater the priority a given MX record will have. The propagation of each record that you modify or create isn't going to take more than several hours and if required, you will also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, that shows how long a record will stay active after it's changed or deleted.