The definition of “hosting” does not describe a single service, but several services that offer various functions to a domain name. Having a site and emails, as an example, are two separate services although in the general case they come together, so most people think of them as one single service. In fact, each and every domain name has a several DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that manages each specific service - the former is a numeric IP address, that defines where the website for the domain name is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the e-mails for the domain address. As an example, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record is mx1.domain.com. Each time you open a site or send an e-mail, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a 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 then be forwarded to the correct server. The idea behind working with separate records is that the two services work with different web protocols and you may have your website hosted by one service provider and the e-mail messages by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Cloud Web Hosting

If you have a cloud web hosting account through our company and you wish to point either your website or your emails to another company, it is going to take you literally just two clicks to do so. 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'll 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 set up more MX records than the default two, it's not going to take more than a few mouse clicks either to add them. You can even set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the greater the priority a particular 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 needed, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which indicates how long a record will stay active after it is modified or deleted.