The word “hosting” does not describe only one service, but a variety of services which provide various functions to a domain. Having a site and emails, for example, are two independent services despite the fact that in the general case they come together, so most of the people see them as one single service. The truth is, each domain name has a couple of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each particular service - the former is a numeric IP address, that identifies where the site for the domain name is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that handles the e-mails for the domain. As an illustration, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record is mx1.domain.com. Each time 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 forwarded to that company. When you have custom records on their end, the Internet browser request or the email will then be forwarded to the correct server. The concept behind using separate records is that the two services employ different web protocols and you could have your website hosted by one service provider and the emails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Shared Hosting

If you have a shared hosting account through our company and you want to point either your site or your e-mails to a different service provider, it'll take you literally simply two mouse clicks to do so. Our Hepsia CP comes with an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domains and subdomains will be listed alphabetically and you are going to be able to see and change 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 default two, it's not going to take more than a few clicks either to add them. Also you can set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the greater the priority a particular MX record is going to have. The propagation of each record that you modify 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 reveals how long a record will remain active after it's changed or deleted.