How to work on a website with a domain name pointed somewhere else?
 

I have a website under domain.com and I was trying to move it to a different hosting, but it did not work there. The website is back at host A and I have all the files and the database (at least from yesterday) at host B.

I would like to keep the website running on host A and troubleshoot the website on host B without the domain name pointing to it. I have one IP address for the hosting, and I have several other websites there, based on Apache / VirtualHost definitions like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
Document Root /home/www/html/some-domain.com
ServerName some-domain.com
</VirtualHost>

So the site is in /home/www/html/domain.com, the IP is 121.42.55.01, lets say. How would I get this to display in the browser, so I can troubleshoot the site? Once I point the domain to this IP it starts a big mess, the site does not work / load there and all the other sites are messed up to (slow loading / connecting for a long time, and one does not work at all because of an overload protection - too many MySQL queries, I think).

I know that this should be possible, but how to do it (the easiest and the fastest way). The http://121.42.55.01/~some-name-here thing?

Thanks.

Stealth Mode ...
 

Well, that's what I call it, anyway.

Every laptop/tabletop workstation should have DNS setup such that it checks the local host file before DNS. On a Mac/Linux box, /etc/hosts/.

If, the server being developed has virtual apache setup to respond to the fully qualified domain that hasn't been moved yet, one can use their local host file thusly:

IPaddressOfDevServer sitesfqdn hostname

Example: Real server is at www.somenet.net and it's public IP address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
The development server is at yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy

At the bottom of the hosts file add:

yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy www.somenet.net www

No need to restart anything, just open a browser and point to www.somenet.net

Just one catch 22 ... as long as you have that 'fake' entry in your /etc/hosts file, can only view etc. the dev site. Can't work on the real site and the 'Stealth' site at the same time.

'spirit of sharing', Ken

You may also want to put in an allow/deny block in the vhost config or at firewall level to ensure that only your IP address can connect.

If you're running multiple websites that have multi-table backend databases you may need to increase the open files limit, if you're using MySQL/CentOS there's a link to a good guide on my blog http://centos.tips

Let's here it for "Poor Mans' DNS". Good stuff that /etc/hosts. ;)
Lock down the "new" site during testing to select IPs: