Custom MX and A Records

See what MX records and A records are, how they impact your sites and how to modify them.

The term “hosting” does not describe one service, but a variety of services which provide different functions to a domain address. Having a site and e-mails, as an illustration, are two independent services although in the general case they come together, so a lot of people see 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 specific service - the first one is a numeric IP address, that identifies where the site for the domain is loaded from, while the latter is an alphanumeric string, which shows the server that manages the emails for the domain name. For instance, an A record is 123.123.123.123 and an MX record is mx1.domain.com. Every time you open a site or send an e-mail, the global DNS servers are contacted to check the name servers that a domain address has and the traffic/message is first directed to that company. In case you have custom records on their end, the web browser request or the e-mail will be forwarded to the correct server. The idea behind using separate records is that the two services employ 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 Cloud Hosting

If you have a cloud hosting account with our company and you would like to switch either your website or your emails to another service provider, it's going to take you literally only 2 mouse clicks to do so. Our Hepsia CP provides an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domain names and subdomains will be listed alphabetically and you are going to be able to see and change the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you wish to use a different email provider and they ask you to create more MX records than the standard two, it will not take more than a couple of clicks either to add them. You may 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 each record that you modify or set up won't take more than several hours and if required, you will also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which indicates how long a record will stay active after it is modified or deleted.