The word “hosting” does not describe a single service, but a number of services that provide numerous functions to a domain address. Having a website and emails, for instance, are two independent services though in the general case they come together, so most of the people consider them as one single service. Actually, every domain name has a several DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that manages each particular service - the former is a numeric IP address, which identifies where the website for the domain is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that handles the e-mails for the domain. For example, an A record would be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record is mx1.domain.com. Each time you open a site or send an email, 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 Internet browser request or the e-mail will be directed to the correct server. The idea behind employing separate records is that the two services employ different web protocols and you may have your website hosted by one company and the emails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Website Hosting

If you have a website hosting account through our company and you want to switch either your site or your emails to a different provider, it will take you literally only two mouse clicks to do it. Our Hepsia Control Panel comes with 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 change the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you want to use a different e-mail provider and they ask you to set up more MX records than the standard two, it won't take more than a few mouse clicks either to add them. You can even set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the higher the priority a certain 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 needed, you will also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which shows how long a record will remain active after it's modified or deleted.

Custom MX and A Records in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The Hepsia hosting Control Panel, included with our Linux semi-dedicated packages, allows you to see the A and MX records for each of the domains or subdomains in your account and if necessary, to edit any of them or create new ones. Controlling these records is quite easy because all domains/subdomains are going to be listed alphabetically, so modifying a record is as simple as entering it in a box and saving the change. Setting up a new one takes a few more clicks and if you experience any problems, you can check out our video tutorials on how to set up A and MX records. Our system is intuitive enough to be used by people with no previous experience, yet advanced enough to offer you full control over all records and to enable you to have different A records even for domain.com and www.domain.com. If you're moving your e-mails to a different company and they ask you to create more than two different MX records, you can choose the priority of each one.