How do I see and test my site if it's not showing up yet

[Sub_Admin]

The most reliable way to walk through and test your website before it actually resolves to the server is to tell your computer that the site is at our servers IP address.

There is another way which involves using your username along with the host name of the server for instance http://host.name.com/~user but that method is flawed in so many areas that unless your site is a purely static site with a specific mix of static and absolute links to pages and images you will not get much of an idea what your site will actually look like when the name resolves.

Back to the part about telling your computer the site is at our IP.:

In your welcome email you were given the IP of your server, and it is fairly easy to spot because it is shown with the label "IP Address" in the section entitled "ACCESSING YOUR WEB SITE" about eight lines down in the welcome email.

You will need only a few things gathered in advance in order to tell your computer the site is at our IP, when in reality it is resolving to another server. The first thing you need is your servers IP shown in the welcome email from us. The second thing you need is the ability to lie to your computers face. The third and final thing you need is the location of a certain file on your computer which is simply called "hosts" with no file extension. Just to be clear - it is NOT called hosts.TXT - it is called hosts. You will want to be sure when you are finished editing this file that the operating system doesn't add a file extension such as .txt to the file.

Here are the locations of the hosts file as listed by Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file

Location
The hosts file is generally named "hosts" and is located in the following directories for each operating system:

Linux and other Unix-like operating systems: /etc
Windows 95/98/Me: %windir%\
Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista: %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ is the default location, which may be changed. The actual directory is determined by the Registry key \HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\DataBasePath .
Mac OS "Classic": System Folder:Preferences or System folder (format of the file may vary from Windows and Linux counterparts)
Mac OS X: either /private/etc or /etc (the latter is a symbolic link to the former; uses BSD-style hosts file)
OS/2 and eComStation: "bootdrive":\mptn\etc\
Novell NetWare: SYS:\ETC

On my particular version of Windows XP Pro it is located at  C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

Simply copy and paste one of the paths in red - bold shown above into your browsers address bar and you will be looking right at the file with very little effort.

Once you find this file open a text editor such as notepad or whatever comes stock with your particular operating system.

Then drag the file by the icon over to the open text editor window. And you will see something like this inside it:

127.0.0.1     localhost

There may or may not be a lot of other lines of text in that file, but the one that looks like this - on a line by itself - is telling your operating system where the website called "localhost" is located.

Below that line of text type the IP of the server and your domain name using the Tab key to separate the two. You could probably get away with just putting a space between the two but why create one more thing to go back and troubleshoot when it doesn't work.

yourdomainip [TAB] your_site.com

and now a second line to type!

yourdomainip [TAB] www.your_site.com

(don't mean to insult your intelligence, but just in case someone needs extra help on this - Press the tab key, don't type the word TAB. And use the actual IP and domain name, not what you see in the example above. Once again I apologize to the rest of you)


Save the file - restart your computer - and it will now think that your site is on our server, when everyone else is still visiting it at its actual location. One word of caution - make sure you just save it, especially windows users, don't choose "save as" or it will probably try to add an extension to the file. Just choose File | Save or simply press these two keys at the same time --> ctrl-s.

You actually don't need to restart the computer, but it will probably take less time to do that than it would to go through many steps of getting your computer to stop going to the cached IP it has for your site before it decides to ask the hosts file where it is at. By default the computer will always check the hosts file first before going out on the Internet and looking up what IP a site is located at.

It is BECAUSE the computer always checks the hosts file first that the file is such a powerful tool. Not only can you browse your site using its domain name and test everything as it will actually look when it resolves to the server there are MANY other benefits to this new found knowledge! (if this IS new found knowledge to you)


Regards,
Bill