The term “hosting” does not describe a particular service, but several services that provide numerous functions to a domain name. Having a website and e-mails, as an example, are two independent services although in the general case they come together, so many people consider them as one single service. In fact, every single domain has a couple of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that deals with each specific service - the first one is a numeric IP address, that identifies where the website for the domain is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the emails for the domain. As an example, an A record is 123.123.123.123 and an MX record can be mx1.domain.com. Each time you open a site 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 forwarded to that company. In case you have custom records on their end, the browser request or the email will then be forwarded to the correct server. The reasoning behind using separate records is that the two services employ different web protocols and you could have your site hosted by one company and the e-mails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Hosting

If you have a hosting account with our company and you wish to move either your website or your e-mails to a different service provider, it will take you literally just two mouse clicks to do so. Our Hepsia Control Panel offers an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domain names and subdomains are going to be listed alphabetically and you'll be able to see and edit the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you choose to use a different email provider and they ask you to create more MX records than the default 2, it is not going to 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 bigger the priority a particular MX record will have. The propagation of any record that you modify or create is not going to take more than several hours and if necessary, you will also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, that reveals how long a record will stay active after it is changed or deleted.

Custom MX and A Records in Semi-dedicated Servers

The Hepsia hosting Control Panel, provided with our Linux semi-dedicated servers, will allow you to view the A and MX records for each of the domains or subdomains in your account and if required, to update any of them or set up new ones. Handling these records is very easy since all domains/subdomains will 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 difficulties, you can check out our educational videos on how to set up A and MX records. Our system is intuitive enough to be used by individuals with little or no previous experience, yet advanced enough to give you 100 % control over all records and to permit you to have different A records even for domain.com and www.domain.com. If you are switching your emails to a different service provider and they ask you to create more than 2 different MX records, you can select the priority of each one.