Hosting Terms

What is MX Record?

MX Record in plain English — the meaning, the comparison, and why it matters to anybody running a website.

Straight answer first

An MX record names the mail servers that accept email for your domain, with priority numbers setting the order of attempts.

Below: the fuller explanation, a picture that makes it stick, why it matters in practice, and where you will actually run into it.

Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026

Terms left unexplained

100+

Definitions, cross-linked

Real

Examples from real kit

Free

To read, naturally

A sending server looks up your MX set and tries the lowest number first, working upwards if that host does not answer. The values must be hostnames rather than addresses, and the set as a whole is your domain's inbound mail policy.

Web and mail come apart here. The site can live in one place and the mail in another purely because the A record and the MX records point at different destinations.

MX Record, by comparison

The 'deliveries round the back' sign on the side of a building. Couriers read it, head for the loading bay listed first, and try the second bay if the first one has its shutters down.

Keep that picture in mind and most of the documentation you will ever read on the subject stops being mysterious.

Why it matters if you run a site

Every story that begins 'our email stopped after we changed hosting' ends at the MX records. They have to be rebuilt wherever the zone now lives, or the world's mail arrives at your address and finds no door to knock on.

That is the test for any technical term, incidentally — not 'do I understand it fully' but 'do I know when it is the answer to my problem'. For this one, you now do.

What it looks like day to day

A business keeps its site here and its mail with a specialist provider. The MX records name the mail provider's hostnames while the A record names our server, and each service sits where it belongs.

Multiply that example by every website on the internet and you have the concept's entire job description in one go.

The Hosting Seller angle

You will meet it in the control panel and occasionally in a support conversation, usually already set the right way. If this term made sense, the natural next reads are DNS, SMTP, SPF and TXT Record.

What you pay on day one is what you pay at renewal, so the year-two invoice holds no surprises worth opening early.

Unexplained jargon is bad service

We treat unexplained jargon as a service failure. This glossary is the support desk's accumulated translations, published where a search engine can hand them out for us.

Real people answer the counter at any hour, including the awkward questions other hosts wave off as out of scope.

100+ terms, all in plain English
Everyday comparisons and real examples
Related concepts linked together
Written by the people on the desk

Why Hosting Seller

On every plan, as standard

Plain English first

Every term defined for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — jargon translated rather than restated.

Pictures that stick

Each concept gets a comparison you will still remember at the moment you actually need it.

Grounded in real kit

Examples point at hosting you would actually use, not at an abstract diagram.

One term, fully landed

MX Record defined, pictured by comparison and placed in your own control panel — recognise-level in a single read.

The stakes spelled out

Not only what it is, but when it turns out to be the answer to a problem you are having.

Linked, never siloed

Related terms cross-reference each other, so one lookup grows into a working understanding.

First Steps

From choosing to live

1
Find it in your own account
Open the control panel and find where this concept lives — seeing it attached to your own site is what turns a definition into understanding.
2
Check what the defaults are
Our platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and you will know your setup instead of hoping about it.
3
Follow the terms next door
Concepts travel in packs — DNS, SMTP and SPF finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.

In the Box

Packed with every plan

Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for your own client
WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
Staging copies so changes get tested before they go live
A 99.9% uptime commitment, watched by monitoring day and night
A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
Real people on the counter, every hour of every day
Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
cPanel, the panel the rest of the trade already knows
A domain free for year one when you order annually
The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price

Across the Counter

The questions we get asked most

What does the MX priority number actually mean?

It is the order of attempt: lowest number tried first, and equal numbers share the load between them. One record at any priority works perfectly well. Multiple entries exist for redundancy, not because the system demands them.

Our mail vanished after a nameserver change — coincidence?

Cause and effect. The new zone was created without the old MX records. Recreate them, along with the SPF and DKIM TXT records, at the newly delegated DNS. Sending servers retry for hours, so acting quickly usually means nothing is lost at all.

How do I read the mail when I am away from the desk?

Webmail opens in any browser, and every mailbox also speaks IMAP, POP and SMTP — so the mail app on your phone, the client on your desktop and webmail all show the same messages in the same order.

Can I test changes somewhere safe first?

Yes — plans with staging let you clone the live site, work on the copy, then push it across when you are satisfied. It is the difference between hoping an update behaves and knowing that it does before any customer meets it.

Can I set the PHP version myself?

Yes — PHP versions are chosen per site from the control panel, so an old application and a current one can sit side by side on the same account. Extensions and per-site settings live in the same screen, and none of it needs a support ticket.

What happens to my files if I leave?

The site and the files stay yours. Pull a full backup from the panel whenever you like, before or during cancellation. Domains remain registered in your name for the term you paid for and can move to any registrar once the standard 60-day window has passed.

Does hosting come with mailboxes?

It does — mailboxes on your own domain ship with every hosting plan, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP access and spam filtering fitted as standard. There is also standalone email hosting for domains whose website lives somewhere else entirely.

Packing up and moving host? Take our checklist.

A plain running order for a move nobody notices: what to copy first, how to carry email across without dropping a single message, when to point DNS, and the two slips behind nearly every hour of downtime we get called about.

Do the launch properly this time.

Every plan carries the essentials other hosts ring up as extras — and support that actually replies.

See the plans