How to Preview your Website

Previewing your website if your domain is not yet pointed to our hosting is very ease. To prevent you the hassle of having to search and replace the preview url once your site goes live we've decided to use a hosts file solution which is the cleanest and most efficient as there is no difference between your live and preview site, even the url is the same.

The idea behind this is that you alter the local host file of your Windows or Mac machine telling the machine that the domain is already forwarded to the new IP so you can locally see the new website but all other people who visit your site still get the old website. To put it simple: You are locally overwriting the resolving IP (DNS record) so your machine thinks the new IP is already active which is only the case for that specific PC where you've altered the hosts file.

Editing the Host File on Windows

Editing the Host File on Mac

Summary

Now you know all about how to preview your new website.