Preview and Working on Site before resolving...?

[Matt]

Just create an account in WHM with his real domain name. Then when you go into WHM and "list accounts" there is an IP address next to his account with a link to his site. You can preview it there before he points his DNS information.

Then he/you can access the "staging" site over the IP. He can also access the cpanel and phpmyadmin stuff from yourresellerdomain.com/cpanel with his username and password that you assigned when you created the account.

The other option is to use a dummy domain, but then it is more work later. You might as well setup the staging site with the real domain, it won't hurt anything to do so. The only issue you may have is trying to email the person because if his email address is @hisdomain.com and you are setting up hisdomain.com on the server, the mailserver will think that hisdomain.com is a local site because it checks itself first, before checking the internet. When it sees that the site lives on this server, it will deliver your email to your staging server not the real site. That can be fixed of course, but the best bet is to make sure you keep in contact with him via an off-site email address until you resolve the domain.

Let me know if you need more information.