The definition of “hosting” doesn't describe one service, but several services which provide various functions to a domain. Having a site and e-mails, as an illustration, are two independent services even though in the general case they come together, so many people think of them as one single service. In fact, each and every domain name has a couple of DNS records called A and MX, which show the server that manages each particular service - the first one is a numeric IP address, that specifies where the site for the domain address is loaded from, while the second one is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the emails for the domain address. For instance, an A record is 123.123.123.123 and an MX record would 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 web browser request or the e-mail will be directed to the correct server. The reasoning behind using separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you may have your website hosted by one provider and the emails by another.

Custom MX and A Records in Shared Hosting

If you have a shared hosting plan through us, you'll be able to view, set up and change any A or MX record for your Internet addresses. So long as a given domain has our Name Servers, you are going to be able to to change particular records by using our Hepsia hosting CP and have your site or emails directed to another provider if you'd like to use only one of our services. Our innovative tool will even enable you to have a domain hosted here and a subdomain below it to be hosted elsewhere by changing only its A record - this will not affect the main domain the slightest bit. If you choose to use the e-mail services of a different provider and they want you to set up more than two MX records, you can easily do that with just a couple of clicks within the DNS Records section of your Control Panel. Also you can set different latency for each MX record i.e. which one will have priority.

Custom MX and A Records in Semi-dedicated Servers

Accessing and changing the A or MX records for any one of your domains or subdomains is very easy if you get a semi-dedicated server plan through our company. The accounts are managed through our in-house built Hepsia Control Panel, which has a section committed to the DNS records of your domain names. The latter will be listed alphabetically and you could click on any one of them to see both the A and the MX records. Editing any record is as easy as entering the new one in a text box and saving the change, so even though you may have never dealt with such matters before, you will not encounter any issues if you wish to move your website or e-mails to a different provider while keeping the second service with our company. When needed, you can also create additional MX records and set a specific priority based on the instructions of the new provider.