Dreamhost - mirror site while in development - dns

new to dreamhost here and have followed the wiki on this but still need some additional help if possible. I want to be able to preview a site while I work on it, before I point the live domain to my dreamhost server. I've added the domain via the Control Panel, and all my files sit in the directory, /home/user/mysite.com - which is correct I think. When trying to follow the wiki with regards the mirroring details, I find that the only option I have is as follows, where I can't change any of these details:
Create the mirror at: mysite.com
Mirror this site: existingsite.com
The existingsite.com is just a live site sitting on the same server space. Is there something I'm missing here? Probably a newb mistake no doubt :)

Mirroring is for you to point a domain to an existing site. Hence this means you can mirror on 1 site. ie. both existingsite.com and mirrorsite.com points to the same server space.
If you want to create a development site, you probably are talking about 2 installations.
In this case, a quick and dirty trick I use is to create a development subdomain, dev.existingsite.com and fully host it. You normally get a /home/user/dev.existingsite.com folder with this. When your site is fully ready, you can edit your fully hosted existingsite.com and point the web directory to dev.existingsite.com. A better way is to SSH in and move the files.
There's an option copy files over in the settings page. Anyway dreamhost live help is pretty good. This is definitely something they will answer.

Related

How do I manage a website left behind by an old employee? (Beginner questions)

So I'm a web designer with experience in HTML, CSS and Java. I've used FTP to manage my site a couple of times for my company.
Overall I have experience in using Joomla and WordPress CMSs, but that's just the problem: I have barely any experience in even understanding DNSs, server stuff, domain management. I could really use some help on this.
Firstly, our IT Manager left so now I'm in charge as the sole web designer of the company. The website URL is www.????.org.uk and that's where the live website is.
Issue here is that sometimes I type in the same URL WITHOUT the www, which results in ANOTHER website (actually a beta I worked on a while ago that I'm sure the IT Manager set up for me).
We have a 123reg account and a HeartInternet Reseller hosting account. I understand that you buy domains, and you can forward them to a hosting platform to manage them and 'serve' them on servers to make them live. So in this case I'm betting it's owned and bought using 123Reg, and hosted on HeartInternet.
Here's the second issue I don't understand. We have a bunch of domains bought, most redirecting to www.????.org.uk, but we ALSO have the URL WITHOUT the www.
Remember what I said earlier? All things point to www version, but we own a domain WITHOUT the www and I can't find the domain listed anywhere with the www, so how in the world can I manage the www site (which is the live site)?
Please do teach me a little if you can about this and point me to the right direction. Thank you!
From what I saw several times before:
By default the www is use-less and points to the default ip:port registered at ????.org.uk. For a reason (that I don't understand) some people create a new DNS entry with a sub-domain called "www" pinging to a different ip and/or port. This results in www.????.org.uk acting like someSubDomain.????.org.uk.
Have you checked if this could be your case?
If it is, I suggest you change the "www" subdomain to "dev" or "beta". This will make www.????.org.uk and ????.org.uk redirect to the same "website" and beta.????.org.uk to the beta version of your company's site.
Be aware that a DNS change could require up to 24h to be spread and updated on the ISP's servers.

Orchard CMS Warmup Status Zero

I have setup a brand new Orchard CMS 1.5.1 site using Web Platform Installer on Windows 2008 Server. I wanted to test out the Performance settings so I configured the following Warmup entries one per line:
/
/blog
...and checked the following options:
x Generate warmup pages periodically 90 Every minutes
x Generate warmup pages any time some content is published
When I visit the site the performance was still a bit slow. The Performance Warmup settings show each page has a status of zero and a red "down arrow" icon next to it.
Is there anything else I need to enable? Is there anything I am missing in the configuration like permissions, etc.
UPDATE:
I have noticed that my site does not have a folder to store the warm up pages. I added that folder manually but it still didn't fix my problems. Are there permissions I would need to set on that folder?
UPDATE 2:
After talking with Sebastien Ros, I think I understand what is wrong but still don't know how to fix it. The base URL setting in Orchard is set to "www.mydomain.com" as it should be but networking-wise my server does not allow my site to go out to the internet and query itself by that address in order to generate the warm-up page. To make matters worse, I have several sites that are hosted on the same IP address and using host headers to distinguish between sites. This prevents me from even being able to configure the base URL as a local IP address (which cause issues with other modules anyway).
Not sure what alternatives I have now.
Thanks,
Brian
Make sure that the general settings page is pointing to your base URL, i.e. http://mywebsite.com.
It may be pointing to the local host by default.
I confirmed with a Network Engineer at my server host that there was a networking restriction on outgoing requests coming back in for the web site. So, the performance module could not query www.mydomain.com and get an answer. Once the network restriction was removed, I was able see Warm-ups create the cache pages with a Status 200.
Alternatively, it was suggested that I create entries in my host file for each of my Orchard sites. I did not try this but I see no reason why it would not work even with the host-headered scenario that I have.
Brian

not able to access mywebsite in webbrowser

my website opens with xx.xxx.xxx.xxx IP address till friday it was working fine..after wards not able view the site in webbrowser...what could be the problem ? how can we solve it?
My server with this IP is working and can able to view the updated data in database ..but not able to view, or open the page of website.before the website under IIS configuration was stooped and now started again..still no use..am couldnt view Login page at all.My application was developed in classic asp long back.Kindly give me any suggestion to this...its very urgent...
I tried browsing the website in IIS manger(server) .It showing page cannot be displayed.
Thanks in advance.
First, Don't Panic. Staying calm can avoid further damage.
While it's hard to tell what could be the problem, the first thing you can do is to "ping" the domain from terminal.Can you login remotely? "wget" (on linux) will download the files from website, and could help you see if the files on the site are still accessible. Check from different browsers or machines, if possible. I'm no expert in asp or IIS, so won't advice on that front. But once I had faced the same situation with my website. So I just called up the hosting service provider, and it turned out it was their problem, and they brought the server online. If it's okay from their end, you might have changed some configurations in your server or application or there might be some up-gradation changing parameters, or even an accidental deletion/ moving/ renaming of files. Just try to remember what are the things you did with your server and application, before it went down, and also ask your server administrator. That will surely help you understand the problem better, if not help to solve it right away.
Good Luck.

Writing a htaccess file - RewriteBase?

Right I'll try and explain my situation as thoroughly as possible while also keeping it brief...
I'm just starting out as a web designer/developer, so I bought the unlimited hosting package with 123-reg. I set up a couple of websites, my main domain being designedbyross.co.uk. I have learnt how to map other domains to a folder within this directory. At the minute, one of my domains, scene63.com is mapped to designedbyross.co.uk/blog63 which is working fine for the home page. However when clicking on another link on scene63.com for example page 2, the URL changes to designedbyross.co.uk/blog63/page2...
I have been advised from someone at 123-reg that I need to write a .htaccess file and use the RewriteBase directive (whatever that is?!) I have looked on a few websites to try and help me understand this, including http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html however it all isn't making much sense at the moment.
Finally, scene63.com is a wordpress site, whether that makes any difference to how the htaccess file is structured I'm not sure...
Any help will be REALLY appreciated - Thanks.
I run my personal public website on Webfusion, which is another branded service offering by the same company on the same infrastructure, and my blog contains a bunch of articles (tagged Webfusion) on how to do this. You really need to do some reading and research -- the Apache docs, articles and HowTos like mine -- to help you get started and then come back with specific Qs, plus the supporting info that we need to answer them.
It sounds like you are using a 123 redirector service, or equivalent for scene63.com which hides the redirection in an iframe. The issue here is that if the links on your site use site-relative links then because the URI has been redirected to http://designedbyross.co.uk/blog6/... then any new pages will be homed in designedbyross.co.uk. (I had the same problem with my wife's business site which mapped the same way to one of my subdirectories).
What you need to do is to configure the blog so that its site base is http://scene63.com/ and to force explicit site-based links so that any hrefs in the pages are of the form http://scene63.com/page2, etc. How you do this depends on the blog engine, but most support this as an option.
It turned out to be a 123-reg problem at the time not correctly applying changes to the DNS.

Can I develop my own websites on my friend website server?

If I buy a hosting (+ domain) service for the website of a friend of mine, and then I decide to use the remaining web space and mysql databases for my development and test...
is google caching my development websites (in other folders and sub-urls) under his website ?
What's the downside to develop on a server with already a production website.. ? I was thinking to create a tiny url linking to a www.myfriendwebsite.com/mydevelopmentSite.. in order to hide the real url.
Thanks
If you don't link to it or don't submit to google or list in a sitemap -- google won't find it.
But, you could also just use a robots.txt to tell google not to index it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
Update: to stop google and malicious bots:
Put a directory in robots.txt using *, and then put your site in a hard to guess subdirectory of that directory -- also, don't keep directory browsing on.
Also -- don't link to it anywhere, but perhaps you can't stop others from linking -- in that case, only robots.txt will keep you out of google. Malicious bots can get the site from the link.
Your hosting provider may have forbidden that in his Terms of Service (mine has). Other than that, I'd go for a subdomain instead of a subdirectory (like mydevelopmentsite.myfriendswebsite.com).

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