The word “hosting” doesn't describe a single service, but several services that offer different functions to a domain address. Having a site and emails, as an illustration, are two independent services even though in the general case they come together, so a lot of people think of them as one single service. In fact, every domain name has a several 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. For instance, an A record can be 123.123.123.123 and an MX record would be mx1.domain.com. Each time you open a site or send an email, 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 web browser request or the email will be sent to the correct server. The concept behind working with separate records is that the two services use different web protocols and you can have your site hosted by one provider and the e-mails by another.
Custom MX and A Records in Shared Web Hosting
If you have a shared web hosting account from our company and you would like to switch either your site or your e-mails to an alternative company, it will take you literally only two clicks to do so. Our Hepsia Control Panel provides an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domains and subdomains are going to be listed alphabetically and you'll be able to see and modify the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you decide to use a different email provider and they ask you to create more MX records than the default two, it won't take more than a few mouse clicks either to add them. You could also set different latency for these records and the lower the latency, the higher the priority a given MX record will have. The propagation of any record that you change or create isn't going to take more than a few hours and if needed, you'll also be able to set the so-called Time-To-Live value, which reveals how long a record will remain active after it is changed or deleted.