As far as I know, I’ve never gotten editing a hosts file to work. That’s a bummer, because sometimes you need to preview a site you’ve just migrated to new hosting, without pointing the DNS over and dealing with the horrors (wonders?) of DNS propagation. hosts is supposed to make that easy, but—at least in my experience as a Windows peasant—it’s super-hard to work with and doesn’t perform as advertised.

I just migrated a site to Kinsta (more on that later!), and in their detailed documentation on site previewing, they mentioned a service I’ve never heard of before: skipdns.link, a service with what I find to be an extremely hard-to-remember name that is also extremely useful.

It basically circumvents the need for a hosts file: you enter the new IP address where your migrated site lives, and the domain name it will eventually live at, and SkipDNS lets you browse the site completely naturally at a temporary domain name it generates.

It’s slightly hard to describe without trying it, so check out the service. I was blown away, and I think you will be too.

Image credit: James Hammond

Visit skipdns.link →