When you buy a domain it takes some time to propagate on the internet. In other words you have to wait for the domain to become available as a working address to your new website. In this case one can’t ‘play’ with their website yet, as there’s no way to see how it will appear on the internet. Your browser will most likely show a static welcome page with your hosting company’s logo and info.
The temporary URL was therefor called to life, usually looking something like this: http://1.2.3.4/~username. Not pretty but at least you could build your site while you wait for the real domain name to become active. All our cPanel clients have the ’tilde username’ option available.
Now, a lot of hosting providers disable the temporary URL feature and all you would see when you go to the temporary URL is: ”This function has been disabled”
There’s another way to use your new domain name immediately(!) while you build your website. Actually with this method it’s even possible to use the domain without yet buying it and see without time pressure if it ‘fits’. Try before buy! That’s the good news. The lesser good news is that only you will be able to see the website unless you share this trick with someone else, for feedback reasons or otherwise…
If you have a development hosting package on Evers Hosting you can use this method to try out different domain names easily.
Here’s what you do to create a temporary working URL
Go to START > type ‘run’ without quotes in the search field > ENTER
Copy the following and hit OK:
notepad %systemroot%system32driversetcHOSTS
Add the following two lines to your ‘hosts’-file:
server ip www.yourdomainname.com
server ip yourdomainname.com
The information should be in an email you received from your hosting company. A server IP looks like 4 sets of digits separated by a dot. (e.g. 109.201.146.81)
In the case you don’t have administrative rights to change the hosts file
Locate notepad (use ‘search’ from the start menu if you don’t know where it is). Right click notepad.exe and choose: run as administrator. From within notepad browse to the hosts file and make the changes.
Only use notepad, not Word, WordPad or anything.
Finally: Don’t forget to remove these lines once your domain becomes ‘live’.