To change your hosts file on a Windows machine you'll want to follow these instructions. We strongly suggest making a copy of your hosts file before making any changes!
Blog Post: How to Edit Your Hosts File on a Windows Computer
First, you'll want to locate your hosts file. The hosts file is located at the following location:
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
In the etc folder you'll see a file with the name hosts. To edit this file you'll want to right click on the file and open it with notepad or any other text editor on your computer. If you don't have Notepad or a text editor on your machine we highly recommend Notepad++.
Once you've opened your hosts file you'll want to add the lines to your hosts file and save. You might edit your hosts file with the following lines:
56.89.159.6 yourdomain.com
56.89.159.6 www.yourdomain.com
The IP 56.89.159.6 will be different for you. This IP is the Shared IP for the server you're on. To find out your server's Shared IP you'll need to log into your control panel (cPanel) account, click the link in the right sidebar for Server Information, and find the Shared IP Address on the next page that loads.
What this allows you to do is see your site's content/data on the PeoplesHost server as if your domain was pointed to our nameservers or IP without actually being pointed to our nameservers or IP. We use this technique quite often to test websites before updating the DNS for customers who have recently decided to migrate to PeoplesHost.
For example, if we completed a migration of a new customer's website from COMPETITOR host we would update our hosts file. Why? Because we have not yet updated the nameservers on the customers domain to point to the new PeoplesHost nameservers. The customer's domain is still pointing to COMPETITOR nameservers. When we add that customers Shared server IP and domain to our hosts file, we can access the site without it actually being "live" since the nameservers haven't been updated. Once we've completed testing on the website to make sure everything is working properly we remove the lines we added to the hosts file and update the nameservers on the customer's domain to the PeoplesHost nameservers.
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