The definition of “hosting” doesn't describe a particular service, but a variety of services that provide different functions to a domain name. Having a website and emails, as an illustration, are two separate services despite the fact that in the general case they come together, so most of the people see them as one single service. In reality, each and every domain has a number of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that manages each specific service - the first one is a numeric IP address, that identifies where the website for the domain name is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the e-mails for the domain name. As an example, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record can be mx1.domain.com. Each time you open a website or send an email, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a domain has and the traffic/message is first directed to that company. In case you have custom records on their end, the Internet browser request or the e-mail will then be sent to the correct server. The reasoning behind using separate records is that the two services work with different web protocols and you could have your website hosted by one provider and the e-mails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Website Hosting

If you have a website hosting account through our company and you want to point either your website or your emails to an alternative service provider, it is going to take you literally simply 2 clicks to do it. 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're 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 default 2, it will not take more than a few mouse clicks either to add them. You may also set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the higher the priority a certain MX record will have. The propagation of each record that you change 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 indicates how long a record will remain active after it's changed or deleted.

Custom MX and A Records in Semi-dedicated Servers

Accessing and modifying the A or MX records for each of your domains or subdomains is incredibly easy if you purchase a semi-dedicated server plan through us. The accounts are managed using our in-house built Hepsia CP, which features a section dedicated to the DNS records of your domain addresses. The latter is going to be listed alphabetically and you could click on each of them to see both the A and the MX records. Editing any record is as simple as typing in the new one in a text box and saving the change, so even though you may have never dealt with such matters before, you will not encounter any difficulties if you choose to point your site or emails to another company while keeping the second service with our company. If needed, you could also set up additional MX records and set a certain priority in accordance with the recommendations of the new provider.