Use sitehoststaging to test your Sitehost site

Sitehost administrators periodically upgrade the Sitehost environment to offer additional features or to patch services and improve security. To give Sitehost users a chance to test their sites against upcoming changes, the administrators have created a staging server for the Sitehost environment that users can access using the sitehoststaging switch.

The sitehoststaging switch not only forces your web browser to use the staging server with the administrator's planned upgrades.

To enable sitehoststaging:

Type the base URL for your site in your browser, and add the string sitehoststaging to this base URL. For example:
- https://account.sitehost.iu.edu/sitehoststaging
If you also have a virtual host for your site, you would add sitehoststaging to the base virtual hostname. For example:
- https://hostname.indiana.edu/sitehoststaging
Make sure your browser is set to accept cookies.
After this cookie is set, when you view pages on your site, all requests will be delivered by the staging server with the upgrades, if any.
If the page on your site has an html <title> </title> tag, the title displayed in the browser will be prefixed with the string Testing -, as a confirmation that you are viewing your site on the alternate server. (Note that the Testing - string is added dynamically by the server; no changes are made to your actual files.)

Note:

If you do not see this, you may be viewing a cached version of the web page instead of the page as it appears on Sitehost. To correct this, hold down the Shift key while clicking the reload/refresh button in your browser.
The cookie set in this manner persists until you close all browser windows. To revert to normal browsing of your site, close your browser.

Important details

You may test multiple sites simultaneously by appending sitehoststaging to multiple URLS (submitting one at a time). This results in a unique cookie being set for each URL.
You may need to submit multiple URLs if your site contains an assortment of full URL links (rather than relative URLs). For example, you have a virtual host named host.indiana.edu, but there is also a www.my_host.indiana.edu alias. If you have full URL links to both https://www.host.indiana.edu and https://host.indiana.edu, both would have to be submitted with sitehoststaging appended to ensure all requests go to the staging server.
Very important for application driven sites: If your application connects to a MySQL database, remember that when testing your site, you will be connecting to your production database unless you make configuration changes for testing.

Feedback

If you find any bugs or have general feedback about the upgrades, contact Tier 2.