Before the website is made public, you can view a development or prelaunch website with a custom domain name by modifying the .) If the directory and file don't exist, you can create them.

Some versions of Windows require that users have admin privileges to create or make changes to this file. Windows 8 users may have trouble editing their Note You should also clear your local DNS cache to ensure your browser is going to the correct website.

You can also use this trick to redirect a website to another website.

For example, let’s say we want to redirect to – so when we type into our address bars, we’ll end up at Twitter. To find it, we can use the ping command and you’ll end up at Twitter!

When using the Internet most people connect to web sites, ftp servers or other Internet servers by connecting to a domain name, as in

Internet applications, though, do not communicate via domain names, but rather using IP addresses, such as 192.168.1.1.

Whenever a device connects to another device on the Internet it needs to connect to it via the IP address of the remote device.

In order to get that IP address, DNS is used to resolve that domain name to its mapped IP address.

What we need is a way to tell the browser that the domain Note that while we have a separate development server, we're editing the hosts file on the computer on which we want to use the domain.

On almost all operating systems whether they be Apple, Linux, Unix, Netware, or Windows the majority of resolutions from domain names to IP addresses are done through a procedure called DNS.

DNS stands for Domain Name System and is the standard domain name resolution service used on the Internet.

If you want to reach this server by using the domain , how would you accomplish that?

Well we can't create or purchase this domain (so far as I know, the TLD doesn't exist...yet).