The term “hosting” does not describe one service, but several services that provide different functions to a domain name. Having a website and emails, as an illustration, are two individual services despite the fact that in the general case they come together, so many people think of them as one single service. In fact, every domain has a couple of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each specific service - the first one is a numeric IP address, that specifies where the site for the domain address is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that deals with the emails for the domain address. For instance, an A record is 123.123.123.123 and an MX record can be mx1.domain.com. Whenever you open a website or send an email, 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. In case you have custom records on their end, the Internet browser request or the e-mail will then be forwarded to the correct server. The reasoning behind employing separate records is that the two services employ 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 Cloud Hosting

If you have a cloud hosting account through our company and you would like to point either your website or your emails to a different provider, it will take you literally only two mouse clicks to do so. Our Hepsia CP comes with an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domain names and subdomains will be listed alphabetically and you will 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 create more MX records than the standard two, it will not 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 higher the priority a certain MX record is going to have. The propagation of each record that you change or set up isn't going to take more than a few hours and if necessary, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which reveals how long a record will stay active after it's changed or deleted.

Custom MX and A Records in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Accessing and editing the A or MX records for any of your domains or subdomains is extremely easy if you purchase a semi-dedicated server plan from us. The accounts are maintained via our in-house built Hepsia Control Panel, which features a section committed to the DNS records of your domain addresses. The latter is going to be listed alphabetically and you may click on each of them to see both the A and the MX records. Modifying any record is as simple as entering the new one in a text box and saving the change, so even though you may have never dealt with such matters before, you'll not experience any issues if you decide to direct your site or e-mails to some other provider while keeping the second service with our company. When necessary, you can also set up additional MX records and set a specific priority based on the instructions of the new provider.