The term “hosting” does not describe just one service, but a set of services which provide numerous functions to a domain. Having a website and e-mails, for instance, are two separate services despite the fact that in the general case they come together, so a lot of people think of them as one single service. In reality, each domain name has a couple of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each specific service - the former is a numeric IP address, which defines where the site for the domain address is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that deals with the emails for the domain address. For example, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record is mx1.domain.com. Every 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 directed to that company. In case you have custom records on their end, the web browser request or the email will be sent to the correct server. The idea behind employing separate records is that the two services work with different web protocols and you could have your site hosted by one service provider and the e-mail messages by another.
Custom MX and A Records in Shared Web Hosting
If you have a shared web hosting account from our company and you would like to move either your site or your e-mails to an alternative provider, it is going to take you literally just 2 mouse 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 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 clicks either to add them. Also you can 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 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, that reveals how long a record will stay active after it is modified or deleted.
Custom MX and A Records in Semi-dedicated Servers
With the Linux semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer, you will have complete control over the records of all domains and subdomains that you add in your hosting account. You can easily check what A and MX records each one of them has from the DNS Records section of the Hepsia hosting CP and changing any record takes only a couple of clicks. If you decide to change your web or e-mail hosting provider, you can update the required record and direct your domain address to the other service provider for one of the services, as you still keep using the other one through us. Also you can keep the main domain address here, while you change the A record of only one of its subdomains. If you're editing the MX records and you need additional ones on top of the default two that we have, you could create them with ease and set a different priority for each and every one.