The definition of “hosting” doesn't describe just one service, but a number of services that offer different functions to a domain address. Having a site and e-mails, as an example, are two independent services despite the fact that in the general case they come together, so most people see them as one single service. The truth is, each domain has a number of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that handles each particular service - the first one is a numeric IP address, that identifies where the site 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. As an example, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record would be mx1.domain.com. Each time you open a website or send an e-mail, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a domain address has and the traffic/message is first forwarded to that company. When you have custom records on their end, the browser request or the e-mail will be forwarded to the correct server. The idea behind using 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 Cloud Hosting

If you have a cloud hosting account from our company and you want to switch either your site or your emails to an alternative service provider, it'll take you literally simply 2 clicks to do this. Our Hepsia CP 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 edit the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you want to use a different email provider and they ask you to create more MX records than the default 2, it won't take more than a couple of clicks either to add them. You may also 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 any record that you modify or set up is not going to take more than several hours and if needed, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which indicates how long a record will stay active after it is changed or deleted.