The definition of “hosting” does not describe only one service, but a variety of services that provide various functions to a domain address. Having a website and e-mails, as an example, are two independent services though in the general case they come together, so many people think of them as one single service. In reality, every domain name has a several 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 site for the domain name is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that deals with the e-mails for the domain address. As an illustration, an A record can be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record can be 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 Internet domain 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 e-mail will be forwarded to the correct server. The reasoning behind using separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you may have your website hosted by one company and the emails by another.
Custom MX and A Records in Website Hosting
If you have a website hosting account through our company and you want to direct either your site or your emails to another service provider, it will take you literally just two clicks to do this. Our Hepsia CP provides an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domain names and subdomains will be listed alphabetically and you are going to be able to see and modify 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 standard 2, it's not going to take more than a few mouse clicks either to add them. Also you can set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the bigger the priority a given MX record is going to have. The propagation of each record that you modify or create is not going to take more than several hours and if required, you will also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which shows how long a record will remain active after it is changed or deleted.
Custom MX and A Records in Semi-dedicated Servers
With the semi-dedicated plans we provide, you'll have full 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 of them has through the DNS Records section of the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and modifying any record requires just a few clicks. If you decide to switch your web or e-mail hosting provider, you can change the required record and direct your domain address to the other service provider for one of the services, while you still keep using the other one through us. You may also keep the main domain name here, while you edit the A record of only one of its subdomains. When you're modifying the MX records and you need additional ones on top of the default 2 that we have, you can create them with ease and set a different priority for each and every one.