Hosting domain, email and website with all separate providers

Question

I have a domain registered with namecheap. I host the pages for this domain at GitHub by adding CNAME and A records at namecheap. This is working great. Now the issue is that I want to have email at this domain. Fortunately, I do have account at A2 Hosting where I can possibly create mail box but how do I make sure that my emails goes there? It appears that I need to change MX record at namecheap. Is that correct? How do I get name of the mail server to put in that record (A2 hosting does not seem to have info on this)? Also, are there any settings needed on the A2 Hosting side (they have cPanel)?

Answer 1

You can contact A2 Hosting support as only they will know whats the MX record to be added at Namecheap.

Answer 2

Answering my question...

Yes - this is completely doable.

First add your domain at your hosting provider. If you have access to cPanel, then click on domains and add it. Don't set up anything else for this domain as you will be hosting pages somewhere else.

Next, create email account at your hosting provider. If you have access to cPanel, this can be done by clicking on Email Accounts. Once email address shows up, click on Check Email which should show POP3/SMTP settings. Before these works, you need to tell your DNS provider about your hosting provider.

You have two choices:

1. Change MX record for your domain at dns registrar (in my case, namecheap). For this you need the (host, value) pair so that dns provider can redirect request for "host" to server specified in "value". For namecheap host=@ means use the domain you have with them and the value comes from your hosting provider. The A2Hosting folks shows this value as "hostname" if you click on manage service.
2. Another way to do this is to create the "A" record at DNS provider for mail.my-domain.com and point to IP of hostname that email provider shows (as in #1 above).