dns - How can I ensure SSL was installed correctly before changing DNSt?

Question

I'm working on a site and have installed an SSL certificate via Plesk. The site is example.com. I'm using hosts.cx to preview the site before I change DNS. However, I think the SSL I'm seeing when I preview the site on hosts.cx is a hosts.cx SSL not mine. My SSL is a Digicert (commercial) SSL.

How can I ensure the SSL was installed properly before I change DNS and send traffic to this new server?

Answer 1

Since the DNS does not resolve the domain to the real IP yet you have to access the server by IP address. But if multiple certificates are setup for the same IP address you somehow need to provide the domain name too.

Probably the simplest way to do this is to make the domain resolve only locally to the new IP address but not globally. This can be done by editing the hosts file on your local machine and provide a mapping there from the domain name to the new IP address. Then you can access the browser on the local machine to access the site as usual, only that it will visit the site on the new IP address and not the publicly known one. Make sure that you actually use the default system resolver, i.e. no DNS over HTTPS or similar though.