This is just a little snippet that might be useful to anyone who has just bought a domain, and is kicking their heels waiting for the DNS info to propagate so they can actually access it and start working on programming the site.

Put an entry like this in your hosts file:
66.228.124.27 example.com

Where the IP address is that of your webhosting server.

This should give you instant access, allowing you to login to cpanel, ftp etc and actually do something.
It works because when you set up the account with your webhost, in my experience at least, they update their DNS the instant you finalise the account.

So, rather than your PC asking some random DNS server “hey, where is example.com?” and getting no answer, you can force it to temporarily ask your webhosts DNS server, which will reply, “hey, I’ve got that, in this directory - here you go!”

This is probably fairly pointless, but I stick it on here in case it helps someone.

However, make sure to check on the site from another PC over the next 72 hours to see the site as the rest of the world sees it, in case there are any problems.

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