The term “hosting” doesn't describe a single service, but a set of services that provide numerous functions to a domain name. Having a website and emails, as an example, are two separate services even though in the general case they come together, so most of the people see them as one single service. In reality, every single domain has a couple of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that manages each particular service - the former is a numeric IP address, that identifies where the website for the domain address is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the e-mails for the domain. For instance, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record is mx1.domain.com. Every time you open a website or send an e-mail, 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 web browser request or the email will be directed to the correct server. The concept behind using separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you can have your site hosted by one service provider and the e-mail messages by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Shared Hosting

If you have a shared hosting account from our company and you want to move either your website or your e-mails to an alternative service provider, it is going to take you literally simply two clicks to do this. Our Hepsia Control Panel offers 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 modify the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you choose to use a different email provider and they ask you to set up more MX records than the standard 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 higher the priority a particular MX record is going to have. The propagation of any record that you modify or create won't take more than several hours and if necessary, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which shows how long a record will stay active after it is changed or deleted.