The definition of “hosting” doesn't describe only one service, but several services that provide different functions to a domain name. Having a site and e-mails, as an example, are two individual services even though in the general case they come together, so a lot of people think of them as one single service. Actually, each and every domain name has a several DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that handles each particular service - the former is a numeric IP address, which specifies where the website for the domain is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that handles 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 site or send an e-mail, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a domain name has and the traffic/message is first directed to that company. If you have custom records on their end, the web browser request or the email will be directed to the correct server. The reasoning behind employing separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you could have your site 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 from our company and you wish to point either your website or your e-mails to another provider, it will take you literally only two mouse clicks to do this. Our Hepsia CP comes with an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domain names and subdomains are going to be listed alphabetically and you will be able to see and change the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you choose to use a different e-mail 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 can also set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the bigger the priority a certain MX record will have. The propagation of any record that you modify or create will not take more than several hours and if necessary, you will also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which shows how long a record will stay active after it is changed or deleted.