There may be situations where you will need/want to view your website on the Warkensoft web server before you have made DNS changes. This could occur if you are moving an existing site to our server and want to leave that site running until all changes are made – or you might just be impatient to get going while DNS changes go through the system (usually between 12 and 36 hours).
In order to do that you need to make a change to your ‘hosts’ file on your local machine. This applies to both a PC and a Mac. This tells your machine where to look for your website. (Wikipedia entry)
On a PC:
With Windows 2000, XP and Vista you need to add the following entry to the bottom of your ‘hosts’ file:
207.78.98.40 www.sampledomain.com (where www.sampledomain.com is your domain name).
The easiest way to do this is to create a shortcut on your desktop – a shortcut which accesses that file directly. Here’s how. Right-click on the desktop and select New > Shortcut.
The following dialogue box will open.
Paste the following line into the “location” box. Click Next, give the shortcut a name and Finish.
C:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
Opening the shortcut should open your ‘hosts’ file in Notepad.
Before you go any further save a copy of your ‘hosts’ file – just in case!
Once the ‘hosts’ file opens it should have ‘127.0.0.1 localhost‘ at the bottom of the page. To make your site accessible before DNS records are complete add the following line (in brown) below the localhost line remembering to replace the domain sample with your own domain name. Save the file and close it. (In Vista you may need to right-click on the shortcut to open the properties box and click the ‘Advanced’ button on the ‘Shortcut’ tab and select ‘Run As Administrator’).
127.0.0.1 localhost
207.78.98.40 www.sampledomain.com (where www.sampledomain.com is your domain name).
Once the file has been updated and saved you may need to reboot your PC before the changes take effect (or run ipconfig/flushdns if you know how to do that).
On a Mac: (view this link)
I am not a Mac user but my understanding is that you need to update ‘/etc/hosts’. Here is another link that may help.