The term “hosting” does not describe one service, but several services which provide a variety of functions to a domain name. Having a website and emails, for instance, are two separate services though in the general case they come together, so many people consider them as one single service. In fact, every domain name has a several DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each particular service - the first one is a numeric IP address, which defines where the website for the domain name is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the emails for the domain name. For instance, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record can be mx1.domain.com. Every time you open a website or send an email, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a domain has and the traffic/message is first directed to that company. In case you have custom records on their end, the Internet browser request or the e-mail will then be forwarded to the correct server. The reasoning behind using separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you may 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 through our company and you wish to direct either your website or your emails to an alternative service provider, it is going to take you literally simply two mouse clicks to do it. Our Hepsia CP offers an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domains and subdomains are going to be listed alphabetically and you're going to be able to see and modify 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 set up more MX records than the standard 2, it won't take more than a few clicks either to add them. You may 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 each record that you modify or set up isn't going to take more than several hours and if necessary, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which shows how long a record will stay active after it's modified or deleted.