Temporary URL for testing?

[falsedawn]

Hi,
At some point I will be moving sites. Does anyone know what URL I can use for testing the site until DNS propagation completes?

Thanks

[danweber]

In the domain control panel there is a "Site Preview" button you can use.

[charles]

Thats for plesk. For cpanel it will be http://yourip/~accountname

hth
charles

[falsedawn]

Hmm, I tried that, and it keeps redirecting me to www.mydomain.com/~accountname

Do I need to park a domain or is there something else I need to do to prevent this?

[charles]

Please submit a support ticket and they can look. It might be that your primary domain as to resolve to the box for this to work, or it could just be an apache config setting.

charles

[falsedawn]

OK - I'm still waiting for my nameservers to be registered first. I will wait until this is sorted.

[danweber]

I had a similar problem when I switched domains between servers. I thought using the ip address to access the control panel would work but there must be redirect directive coming from the server with the domain name and the ip address got replaced with the domain name, which resolved to the old server.

I worked around the issue by defining the domain name and ip address locally on my machine (hosts file) and this worked until the DNS propagation took place. You may want to give that a try.

Dan

[falsedawn]

Thanks for the reply, but I am pretty clueless when it comes to anything linux at the moment (although I am learning lots of stuff!) and have no idea how to do that.

[danweber]

You have to make this change on the machine that has the browser that you use to access the website.

If it is Linux then the file you have to edit is /etc/hosts
Add a line like this to the end, where 123.123.123.123 is the ip address of the webserver and www.mydomain.com is the domain you want to map to it. This works like a local DNS mapping.

123.123.123.123 www.mydomain.com


If you have a Windows workstation then the same file is located in
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Make the same change there.

Dan

[falsedawn]

Thanks, works great.