Installation Failure without DNS Propagated

[jlkane]

Today LiquidWeb support followed up on my concern about the environment they're providing. They wrote:

I wanted to let you know that we have made the configuration changes and it appears the site is now accessible via the method you were trying before. As I said however, for development purposes I would not trust this method.

I'm happy to be back on track, but I told LiquidWeb tech support that I would still like to better understand the following things:

- What was the nature of the environment change that was needed to provide access using a temporary URL based on the machine name? Every other web host with whom I've worked is set up this way, and I'd just like to understand what LiquidWeb is doing differently.

- Do you regard the LiquidWeb configuration choice as a bug? ...or is it a feature? (Was this choice made to enhance security during the pre-production phase of a new website's life? ...if not, why then?)

- You say that "...for development purposes I would not trust this method." What makes it untrustworthy? Under what circumstances would you expect it to fail?

Here's their answer:

The issue was caused by a recent switch that we made on our shared environments to the FCGI php handler. This allowed better speed and quicker opening and closing of connections but did not support the mod_userdir required for viewing sites as you were trying to. Thankfully a very recent update allowed us to enable it for this handler. Honestly I am not sure what caused the issues we have experienced when using this method to test the environment. It may be an issue with hardlinks in the sites not being displayed the same way by the mod_userdir as they would be displayed live or perhaps a caching issue. In your situation my suggestion would be to test it yourself using the edited hosts file method and then you can still have your clients view it with the other method. This way it will be easy for them to view and you can be secure knowing that you are seeing what will really occur when the site goes live. Sorry I do not have solid information on why it has failed in the past.

Thanks to all of you who have followed this adventure and contributed to this discussion. Feel free to suggest any followup questions you'd like me to pass on to LiquidWeb tech support before we consider this case closed.

[Jeff]

I would not use their temp url, I would setup a development sub-domain instead (like http://dev.mydomain.com).

Setting up a sub-domain should mimic the actual domains settings (not using mod_userdir for one).

Jeff