The definition of “hosting” doesn't describe just one service, but a number of services which offer various functions to a domain name. Having a website and emails, as an example, are two independent services even though in the general case they come together, so a lot of people see them as one single service. In reality, each domain has a number of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each particular service - the first one is a numeric IP address, that identifies where the site for the domain is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the e-mails for the domain. As an example, an A record can be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record can be mx1.domain.com. Every time you open a site or send an e-mail, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a Internet 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 be directed to the correct server. The reasoning behind using separate records is that the two services employ different web protocols and you may have your site hosted by one company and the emails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Shared Web Hosting

If you have a shared web hosting account with our company and you want to switch either your site or your emails to another service provider, it'll take you literally simply 2 clicks to do it. Our Hepsia Control Panel offers an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domain names and subdomains are going to 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 standard two, it's not going to 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 given MX record is going to have. The propagation of every record that you change or create won't take more than a few hours and if necessary, 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.