Web Hosting Forum

**frank727** · 06-28-2007, 03:32 PM

I signed up for a new virtual server and was surprised to learn that I could not access the site using the IP address. I'm moving my web site to this new provider and need to do some testing on it before I 'flip' the domain name IP switch - now I'll have to activate a temp domain name to point to it so I can test the site.

The support dept told me their servers are not setup to access via the IP because this is hit and miss thing...aka not reliable. Is this true? I've never heard of this before.

Thanks...

**Riane** · 06-28-2007, 03:38 PM

What is your website?

Anyway, if you're not paying for a dedicated IP address, then you're on a shared IP address and access to your site would be xx.xxx.xxx.xx/~username.

And they are right, it is a hit and miss thing. A lot of times because of the URL that is being used to access the site, will cause issues with viewing items that are linked via the backslash.

For example, if you were to try to access a wordpress install on a temporary URL (ip address) and you had permalinks set up through htaccess to access it like post/date/title, it would show up as a 404.

Just switch the DNS over.

**frank727** · 06-28-2007, 05:15 PM

OK thanks.

I can't just switch the DNS over - I have to test many things on the new VDS before I can release it to my customers. I've got a spare domain name I'm not using so I'm going to use that to test the new site with - will take about a day before it 'sees' the new server. Once I'm happy that the new VDS is working normally, I'll do the final domain switch over.

Thanks again for your comments...

**Riane** · 06-28-2007, 05:19 PM

Have you ever considered testing in locally? If you need access to PHP/MySQL or something, you can always google for XAMPP and set that up.

**iHubNet** · 07-01-2007, 05:12 AM

http://shared_ip/~username should work...

**tripy** · 07-01-2007, 06:50 AM

it's because the server are doing a virtual name hosting.
Every sites on the server refer to the same ip adress, and the server need the site's name in the request to know which one the present.

You can bypass this effect by locating a file named "hosts" (without quotes nor extention, in your windows\system32 folder

Then, you can add a line like this one:

Code:

192.168.3.5         myserver.com

Adapt the ip adress and the name accordingly.
This file is checked before doing a request on dns server, and if windows finds an entry in the form ip {space} name, then it use this results rather than querying the dns