[How To] Preview A Site Before It Resolves Using the Windows Hosts File

[Matt]

If you cannot access the site using the temporary IP address, you can modify your Windows hosts file instead.

A) Opening the hosts file

Windows XP
To modify the file in XP, go to the Start menu then in the search box type "Notepad" then you see notepad come up in the search results, click on File > Open and open the file called C:Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8
To modify the file in Vista go to the Start menu then in the search box type "Notepad" then you see notepad come up in the search results, right click on it and select "Run As Administrator"

No that notepad is opened up, go to the file menu and browse to
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

B) Editing the hosts file

Now that you are editing the hosts file, go to the last line of the file and add the following line:

111.111.111.111     somedomain.com

111.111.111.111 is the IP address for your website, found in your welcome email.

somedomain.com is your domain name that you wish to preview.

Now when you visit somedomain.com in your browser (or any other application that uses DNS) you will be looking at the new server.

When you are done testing you should comment out the line from the hosts file using the # symbol before any other characters in this line, so that this line is skipped when Windows reads the file.
(example)

# 111.111.111.111     somedomain.com

Or, if you are done testing, you can simply remove the 111.111.111.111 somedomain.com line from the hosts file and save.