Accessing your site before changing DNS

Sometimes you may need to set up your new hosting before changing over your domain nameservers to point to Serversaurus, but you need to see your site on our servers.

You can do this by telling your computer to use the IP address of our server instead of looking it up in DNS.

To do this, you need to update your hosts file, and add an entry at the end of the file for your domain pointing to our server IP address, e.g.

123.456.789.012 www.mydomain.com.au
123.456.789.012 mydomain.com.au

Note: Update both values in the above example to the appropriate ones, the server IP address is included in your Serversaurus Welcome email.

 

If you’re on a PC:

Edit the file C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and add the above entry at the end.

On a Mac:

The file is /etc/hosts, and you need to edit it by opening the Terminal application and using the following command:

sudo pico /etc/hosts

Enter your password and then use the down arrow to go to the end of file and add the line. Then type Ctrl-X to exit, and Y followed by Return to save the change.

Note: you can replace pico with the editor of your choice such as vi if you’re familiar with unix editors.

You can then use your Web Browser as normal to access the site.

Once the site is ready to go live, just remove that line from the hosts file.