Having total control of your domains is something really crucial and being able to access and edit the DNS records for every one of them is among the things you need to look for when you search for a registration or a shared hosting provider. You may have heard of the so-called “name servers” that show where a domain address is hosted, but below them there's a whole group of records, like the A record, which is the IP address of the server hosting the website, and the MX records, which show the server that manages the e-mails for a specific domain name. These records are used if you want to have your web site with one company and the emails with another, for instance. You could also use a domain for a non-website service or forward the traffic to it through special records. Some companies ask for an extra payment to give access to edit specific DNS records apart from the name servers.