A key part of our Managed Migration process (which we talked about in detail in the last post) is site testing. It’s important that when we move your sites to Prostack, you take the opportunity to carry out as much detailed testing as possible, so that there are no surprises when you go live.
The usual way of doing this is by modifying your computer’s hosts file, to trick it into pointing your site’s domain to us, instead of your old hosting provider. Unfortunately, doing this is not straightforward, and has it’s limitations- particularly if you’re testing on mobile devices. And if you have less-technical stakeholders who want to test things too, they might not find it easy to make the necessary changes.
With this in mind, we set out to build a service that makes it quick and easy to test sites on Prostack without requiring any complex changes to your devices. We’re calling this Prostack Preview, and it can be found at https://preview.prostack.host.
Preview lets you generate temporary URLs to test your sites, in any browser, from any device, quickly and easily. The URL will point to your site on our network, allowing you to test and make sure everything works before you go live. Behind the scenes, we automatically rewrite links and references to stylesheets and other code so that they load from the preview URL, but without you needing to make these changes yourself.
Setting up a preview URL for a site already on us is easy- just visit https://preview.prostack.host and fill in the form.
We’re introducing Preview URLs as a standard part of our migration process too, so if you’re a new customer coming onboard, we’ll automatically generate these links for all of your sites and send them to you.
Preview URLs can also be used for staging or development purposes too- if you have a copy of a site on our network that isn’t live, or doesn’t have DNS pointing to it, you can use a preview URL to test it, or even to provide demonstrations to your customers.
If you have any questions about this service, or want to explore our Fully Managed hosting migrations further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch- we’d love to hear from you.
