The word “hosting” doesn't describe a single service, but a number of services that provide different functions to a domain. Having a website and e-mails, as an example, are two individual services although in the general case they come together, so most people think of them as one single service. Actually, each and every domain name has a number of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that manages each specific service - the first one is a numeric IP address, that specifies where the website for the domain name is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that deals with the emails for the domain address. As an example, an A record can be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record can be mx1.domain.com. Whenever 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 directed to that company. In case you have custom records on their end, the browser request or the email will be forwarded to the correct server. The reasoning behind employing separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you can have your website hosted by one company and the e-mail messages by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Cloud Hosting

If you have a cloud hosting account with our company and you wish to switch either your website or your emails to a different company, it'll take you literally just 2 clicks to do so. Our Hepsia CP comes with an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domains and subdomains will be listed alphabetically and you'll 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 couple of mouse clicks either to add them. You can even set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the bigger the priority a certain MX record is going to have. The propagation of any record that you modify or set up won't take more than a few hours and if necessary, you'll 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.