Glossary Entry
What is MX Record?
What MX Record actually means, buzzwords removed — with the example that makes it land.
The short answer
The mail servers accepting email for your domain are named in its MX records, whose priority numbers set the order senders work through them.
What follows: the longer explanation, a picture that holds, the practical stakes, and the places you will genuinely meet it.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
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A sending server reads your MX set and contacts the lowest number first, working upwards when a host does not answer. The values must be hostnames rather than addresses, and the full set amounts to your domain's inbound mail policy.
This is the point where the web and the mail part company. Website in one place, mailboxes in another: the arrangement works because the A record and the MX set aim at entirely separate hosts.
MX Record, by way of an analogy
The manifest naming which terminal takes inbound freight. A carrier reads it, goes to the first dock on the list, and tries the second when the first does not answer.
Carry that picture with you and most documentation on the topic loses its mystery on a first read.
Why it matters to a site owner
Follow any 'our email died when we changed hosting' story far enough and it ends at the MX records. They have to be rebuilt wherever the zone now lives, or the world's mail servers arrive to find nothing prepared to accept a delivery.
That, incidentally, is the bar for any technical term — not 'could I lecture on it' but 'would I recognise it as the answer to my problem'. For this one, you now would.
How it turns up day to day
One business hosts its website here while its mail sits with a specialist provider. The MX records name that provider's hostnames while the A record names our server, so each service sits where it belongs.
Scale that example across every website online and you have described the whole job of the concept in one stroke.
How Hosting & Domains deals with it
You will meet it in the control panel and now and then in a support thread, usually already set correctly. If this one landed, the natural follow-ups are DNS, SMTP, SPF and TXT Record.
The rate you register at is the rate you renew at, so year two costs precisely what year one did — nothing lying in wait on the invoice.
Unexplained jargon slows everybody down
Sooner or later every confusing hosting term turns into a support ticket, so we defined the hundred commonest ones properly — once, in the same plain English we use with customers.
Mailboxes at your own name are part of the plan — mail is included, not sold back to you at the checkout.
- 100+ entries, plain English all the way
- Ordinary analogies, working examples
- Neighbouring ideas linked together
- Written by our own support engineers
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Jargon-free by design
Definitions written for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — translation rather than restatement.
Analogies that hold
Every concept comes with a mental model that returns exactly when you need it.
Tied to real hosting
Examples name platforms you would genuinely use, never an abstract diagram on a whiteboard.
This term, properly landed
MX Record defined, pictured by analogy and located in your own panel — recognise-level after a single read.
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find it in your own account
Open the control panel and find where this idea sits — a definition turns into understanding the moment it attaches to your own site.
- 2
Check the defaults as they stand
The platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and your setup becomes something you know instead of hope.
- 3
Chase the neighbouring terms
Hosting terms travel in groups — DNS, SMTP and SPF finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Upgrades applied in place, with no migration when you change plan
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- A renewal figure identical to the one you registered at
- Staging copies for trying a change before it goes live
- Softaculous included for one-click application installs
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client
- A daily copy, with restores you run yourself from the panel
- WebP image optimisation built in, at no extra charge
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
What does the MX priority number do?
It sets the order of attempts, with the lowest number tried first and equal numbers sharing the traffic. A single record on its own, at any priority, is perfectly valid. Extra entries exist for redundancy rather than because the standard insists.
Our email died straight after a nameserver change. Related?
Directly. Whoever built the new zone left the old MX records out. Rebuild them at whichever DNS the domain now delegates to, and bring the SPF and DKIM TXT records across in the same session. Sending servers retry for hours, so moving quickly usually means nothing is actually lost.
How do I read my mail away from my desk?
Webmail runs in any browser, and every mailbox also speaks IMAP, POP and SMTP — so the app on your phone, the client on your desk and webmail stay in step, showing the same messages in the same state.
Is there a safe place to try changes?
Yes — plans with staging let you copy the live site, work on the copy, then publish it once it behaves. That turns 'hope the update works' into 'know it works' before a single customer meets it.
Keep reading
SMTP
Outbound mail travels on SMTP, from your mail app to your mail server and onwards from there to servers els…
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
SPF is a DNS record naming the mail servers allowed to send for your domain, which gives receivers a way to…
How to Create an SPF Record
Step by step, with every snag flagged before you get to it.
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