The term “hosting” doesn't describe a particular service, but a number of services that offer various functions to a domain address. Having a site and emails, for instance, are two individual services though in the general case they come together, so a lot of people think of them as one single service. In fact, every domain name has a couple of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each specific service - the former is a numeric IP address, that identifies where the website for the domain is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that deals with the e-mails for the domain name. As an example, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record is mx1.domain.com. Every time you open a site or send an email, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a domain name has and the traffic/message is first forwarded to that company. In case you have custom records on their end, the web browser request or the e-mail will be forwarded to the correct server. The reasoning behind working with separate records is that the two services employ different web protocols and you may have your site hosted by one company and the emails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Shared Web Hosting

If you have a shared web hosting account with our company and you would like to direct either your website or your e-mails to another service provider, it is going to take you literally only two mouse clicks to do so. Our Hepsia Control Panel provides 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 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 few clicks either to add them. Also you can set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the greater the priority a certain MX record is going to have. The propagation of each record that you modify or set up will not take more than a few hours and if required, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, that reveals how long a record will remain active after it's modified or deleted.