The definition of “hosting” does not describe only one service, but a number of services which provide a variety of functions to a domain address. Having a website and e-mails, as an illustration, are two independent services despite the fact that in the general case they come together, so most of the people consider them as one single service. The truth is, each and every domain name has a couple of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each particular service - the former is a numeric IP address, that defines where the website for the domain address is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that deals with the emails for the domain. As an illustration, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record would 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. When you have custom records on their end, the browser request or the e-mail will be directed to the correct server. The idea behind using separate records is that the two services employ different web protocols and you could have your site hosted by one provider 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 move either your website or your e-mails to a different service provider, it is going to take you literally just two clicks to do this. Our Hepsia Control Panel provides an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domains and subdomains will be listed alphabetically and you're going to be able to see and change the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you wish to use a different email provider and they ask you to set up 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 greater the priority a given MX record is going to have. The propagation of any record that you change or set up won't take more than several hours and if required, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which indicates how long a record will remain active after it is changed or deleted.

Custom MX and A Records in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The Hepsia hosting CP, included with our Linux semi-dedicated hosting packages, allows you to see the A and MX records for each of the domain names or subdomains in your account and if required, to update any of them or set up new ones. Controlling these records is very easy since all domains/subdomains will be listed alphabetically, so editing a record is as simple as entering it in a box and saving the change. Creating a new one takes a few more clicks and in case you experience any issues, you can check out our educational videos on how to set up A and MX records. Our system is intuitive enough to be used by people with no previous experience, yet advanced enough to give you full control over all records and to allow you to have different A records even for domain.com and www.domain.com. If you're switching your e-mails to a different provider and they ask you to create more than two different MX records, you can choose the priority of each one.