[support] support Digest, Vol 120, Issue 34

[Earnie Boyd]

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.

-- 
Earnie
-- https://sites.google.com/site/earnieboyd