On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Richard Damon wrote:
Every site on the internet should have a domain name for people to get to. (It is possible to access a site via just its IP address/port number, but this isn't done often, and doesn't work for shared servers), so to do any testing on a shared server you need a domain name that you "own".
I really dislike misinformation and the only reason I'm responding to this issue. You do not need "a domain name that you "own"". You will need to map the IP for the server to a domain name but it doesn't need to be registered in a DNS. You map the IP to a domain name via the client hosts file. On a *nix system that would be /etc/hosts. On Windows it would be %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. I typically use a fictitious host name of ``local.test'' with the name of the real site prepended such as example.local.test. I enter the following in my client hosts file for my dev/test site.
127.0.0.1 example.local.test example
Replace 127.0.0.1 with the appropriate IP address for your server. Doing this allows you to develop and test a site before putting it on line.