Use an A-record to point to Planet Argon

Say you own example.com, and you just created a Planet Argon account with that domain name but you haven’t moved your DNS servers. You want to point myapp.example.com to Planet Argon to test your app. Here’s how to do it.

Determine which IP address to use

First, you need to find out what the IP address is for your account. When Planet Argon sets up your account they modify their internal DNS records to point your domain (let’s say example.com) to the correct IP address. So even if you haven’t moved your DNS to PA’s servers, you can still find out what address has been assigned to you by SSH-ing into the server and typing:

The result will look like:

PING example.com (198.xxx.xx.xx): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 198.xxx.xxx.xx: icmp_seq=0 ttl=53 time=321.388 ms
64 bytes from 198.xxx.xxx.xx: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=344.396 ms

--- example.com ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 321.388/332.892/344.396/11.504 ms

The important part is the 198.xxx.xxx.xx you get back – this is the IP address you want.

Create the “A” Record

Then log into your Domain Name manager and create an “A” record that points myapp.example.com to the 198.xxx.xxx.xx address.

Create a domain alias in VHCS

• Go to the VHCS control panel, click Manage Domains and add an alias.
• For the alias, type myapp.example.com and accept the default Directory Mount Point (it doesn’t matter if it exists or not).
• Click save, and wait a few seconds for it to take effect – refresh the page until it is no longer “pending”

Modify your web server config files

Next, update your Lighttpd/Pound/Nginx/Apache config file’s server_name to myapp.example.com. If your server is running, you will need to restart it.