URL for seeing and building a site without name propagation

[1361]

What url would I give to someone to view, build and test a site before pointing the name and going live?

 

[Brian]

You would use the preview URL included in your 'New Account Information' email. That URL looks like http://wdc001.hawkhost.com/~youruser/pathtosite/index.html

In the above example you'd replace the server name with your server, enter your username after the ~, and then the path to your test install within your public_html directory. If you contact our support team asking for the preview URL for your account they can give you the exact link to use.

[tgonhawk1]

While that approach can serve for most purposes,
it has at least one shortcoming:

Certain hyperlinks within the site won't work.
These are of the form [a href="/somepath/somepage.html"]
I have used square brackets [ ] to avoid it being recognized as HTML here (and not appearing).

To get around that problem, you can make all your links relative, [a href=../../somepath/somepage.html]
but you may not want to do that.

Another possibility is this:
in the HOSTS file for your own computer add an entry like this:
123.45.67.89 (tab) mydomain.com
Where you put the actual IP address and domain name.

Then for you, and you alone, when you access mydomain.com it will take
you to your still-in-development website.  When you then go live and
have your DNS point to the site, you can remove that line from HOSTS.