Every registered domain has no less than two Name Server records which show where it is hosted i.e. by using these records you point your domain address to the servers of a specific website hosting provider. This way, you've got both your site and your e-mails handled by the exact same provider. On the lower level of the Domain Name System (DNS), however, there are lots of other records, like A and MX. The first one reveals which server deals with the website for a given domain address and is always an IP address (123.123.123.123), while the second one reveals which server deals with the emails and is always an alphanumeric string (mx1.domain.com). For instance, any time you enter a domain name in your web browser, your request is forwarded through the global DNS system to the provider whose NS records the domain name uses and from there you could be forwarded to the servers of another provider provided you have set an IP address of the latter as an A record for your Internet domain. Having separate records for the site and the emails means you can have your site and your emails with two different companies if you'd like.
Custom MX and A Records in Shared Web Hosting
If you have a shared web hosting account through our company and you want to point either your site or your e-mails to another service provider, it is going to take you literally just 2 mouse clicks to do this. Our Hepsia CP provides an easy-to-use DNS Records tool, where all your domains and subdomains are going to be listed alphabetically and you will be able to see and edit the A and/or MX records for any of them. If you decide to use a different e-mail provider and they ask you to create more MX records than the standard two, it's not going to 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 greater the priority a particular MX record is going to have. The propagation of every record that you change or set up won't take more than a few hours and if necessary, 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 modified or deleted.