The definition of “hosting” does not describe only one service, but a variety of services that offer various functions to a domain name. Having a website and emails, for example, are two separate services even though in the general case they come together, so most people see them as one single service. In fact, every single domain name 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 defines where the website for the domain is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that deals with the e-mails for the domain name. As an example, an A record is 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 has and the traffic/message is first forwarded to that company. If you have custom records on their end, the Internet browser request or the email will be sent to the correct server. The idea behind using separate records is that the two services work with different web protocols and you could 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 with our company and you want to direct either your website or your emails to an alternative company, it's going to take you literally only 2 clicks to do it. Our Hepsia Control Panel provides an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domain names and subdomains will be listed alphabetically and you'll be able to see and edit the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you decide to use a different email provider and they ask you to set up more MX records than the default two, it will not take more than a couple of 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 given MX record will have. The propagation of every record that you modify or create will not take more than several hours and if necessary, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, that indicates how long a record will stay active after it is changed or deleted.