The term “hosting” does not describe only one service, but several services which provide different functions to a domain name. Having a website and emails, for example, are two independent services despite the fact that in the general case they come together, so many people think of 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 particular service - the former is a numeric IP address, that specifies where the site for the domain address is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the emails for the domain name. For example, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record can be mx1.domain.com. Whenever 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 directed to that company. When you have custom records on their end, the browser request or the email will be directed to the correct server. The idea behind employing separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you could have your site hosted by one company and the e-mail messages by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Cloud Web Hosting

If you have a cloud web hosting account from our company and you wish to switch either your site or your emails to a different company, it's going to take you literally just 2 clicks to do it. Our Hepsia CP offers 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 decide to use a different email provider and they ask you to create more MX records than the standard 2, it is 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 bigger the priority a certain MX record will have. The propagation of every record that you modify or set up won't take more than several hours and if needed, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which shows how long a record will remain active after it's changed or deleted.