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

Custom MX and A Records in Shared Website Hosting

The Hepsia hosting Control Panel, that comes with each and every Linux shared website hosting package we offer you, will allow you to view, modify and set up A and MX records for any Internet domain or subdomain inside your account. From the DNS Records section, you will be able to see a list of all hosts inside the account from a to z with their corresponding records, so any update will not take you more than a few clicks. Setting up new records is as simple if, for example, you want to use the e-mail services of another provider and they ask you to set up more MX records than the default 2. Additionally you can set the priority for each MX record by setting different latency. Put simply, when your e-mails are delivered, the sending server is going to contact the record with the smallest latency first and if the connection times out, it will contact the next one. With our innovative tool, you are going to be able to control the records of your domain names and subdomains effortlessly even when you have no prior experience with such matters.