The term “hosting” does not describe a single service, but several services which offer various functions to a domain. Having a site and e-mails, for example, are two individual services though in the general case they come together, so a lot of people think of them as one single service. In reality, every domain name has a several DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that manages each specific service - the former is a numeric IP address, that defines where the website for the domain address is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that handles the emails for the domain. For example, an A record is 123.123.123.123 and an MX record is 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 name has and the traffic/message is first directed to that company. When you have custom records on their end, the Internet browser request or the e-mail will be forwarded to the correct server. The reasoning behind using separate records is that the two services work with different web protocols and you can have your website hosted by one provider and the e-mail messages by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Shared Hosting

If you have a shared hosting account with our company and you would like to move either your website or your e-mails to another company, it's going to take you literally just 2 clicks to do it. Our Hepsia Control Panel offers an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domains and subdomains are going to be listed alphabetically and you will be able to see and edit 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 default two, it won't 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 higher the priority a certain MX record is going to have. The propagation of any record that you modify or create won't take more than several hours and if necessary, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which reveals how long a record will stay active after it's changed or deleted.

Custom MX and A Records in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The Hepsia hosting CP, provided with our semi-dedicated packages, allows you to see the A and MX records for every one of the domains or subdomains in your account and if needed, to update any of them or set up new ones. Controlling these records is very easy because all domains/subdomains will be listed alphabetically, so updating a record is as easy as entering it in a box and saving the change. Setting up a new one takes just a few more clicks and if you experience any troubles, you can check out our instructional videos on how to set up A and MX records. Our system is user-friendly enough to be used by people with little or no previous experience, yet sophisticated enough to provide you with full control over all records and to permit you to have different A records even for domain.com and www.domain.com. If you are moving your e-mails to a different company and they ask you to set up more than two different MX records, you may choose the priority of each one.