Advice on setting up new multisite with hosting

You could try using you local hosts file to ‘cheat’ but that wouldn’t be visible to everyone else.

or grab a throwaway domain to use.

Though do grab one the same character length as the ‘real’ on ?? It’ll make search/replace so much easier.

cool. We were thinking of using the throwaway domain. I’m glad we’re finally getting the hang of this stuff. Thanks!

well – just found out that bluehost will not let us use a throwaway domain name to build the multi-site, then transfer to our real domain name. apparently if you setup an account with them with the domain name you are wanting to use, you must build the site with that name and you can only change to a different domain name, essentially trashing the original domain name. If we had known this from the start we would’ve setup the account with a throw away domain name to get it built correctly before transfering to the live domain name. Is anyone aware of any other options for building a test multi-site, getting it all working before transferring our content and transfering to our existing live domain name? We do not want to build the testsite on our internal servers because it there are issues with them – that is why we were looking to move to a hosting service. Thanks.

Can you park a domain on your current setup?

@ipstenu – I’m not sure if you were asking about our internal server or bluehost setup. Internal – no, On bluehost – yes, we can add parked and addon domains. Would an addon domain work? or a parked?

One or the other might work on bluehost, I don’t know how they set things up. :/

If you set it up as a Parked Domain, then it will use the same files as your current primary domain… Which means if you install WordPress on it, it will likely overwrite whatever you have for your primary domain.
If you set it up as an Addon Domain, it will have it’s own folder. It sounds like Addon is what you would want.

Just remember that, if you build a temporary/test site, you are going to need to do some configuration changes to try to get it to work on the real site when you move it over. As Ipstenu mentioned, make sure your throwaway domain has the same number of characters in it as the real domain that your site will be replaced with.