The word “hosting” doesn't describe one service, but a variety of services which offer a variety of functions to a domain. Having a website and emails, for instance, are two individual services although in the general case they come together, so most of the people see them as one single service. The truth is, each domain has a several DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that handles each specific service - the former is a numeric IP address, that specifies where the site for the domain name is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that handles the e-mails for the domain address. For 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 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. When you have custom records on their end, the browser request or the email will be directed to the correct server. The concept behind using separate records is that the two services employ different web protocols and you can have your site hosted by one service provider and the e-mails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Shared Hosting

If you have a shared hosting account with our company and you want to move either your website or your e-mails to an alternative provider, it's going to take you literally just 2 mouse clicks to do so. Our Hepsia CP offers an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domain names and subdomains will be listed alphabetically and you will be able to see and modify 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 default two, it will not take more than a couple of 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 every record that you change or create won't take more than a few hours and if needed, 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 is modified or deleted.