Develop a website in a test hosting – .com

In this tutorial I tell you how to develop your website in a hosting without having to pay anything (neither domain nor hosting) until you launch it.

Where to develop a website?

I have spoken on many occasions about . Although there are many options, my favorite is to do it where will it be on the server.

It is true that we can develop it locally, or on other servers by modifying hosts, as I comment in this tutorial, but the most comfortable way to avoid migrations or PHP or MySQL version problems is to develop the web in the same place where we are going to throw.

Sometimes, especially when we start our project, any help is welcome to save on expenses. That is why today we will see how to develop a website on a test platform.

CDmon test platform

There are several hostings that offer this possibility. Today I will tell you how to do it with CDmon, since it is one of the best hosting companies in Spain today.

The first thing we will do is go to the and register as users (It’s free). If we already have a user, we simply identify ourselves and that’s it.

Then we access the system, and we go to “Hosting list” and activate the platform by clicking on “Activate Test Platform”.

test domain

Next we have to enter the domain we want to use. Here we have two options: Use a permanent domain or a temporary one:

• If we already have a purchased domain and we want to use it, we introduce it here, and we will indicate the CDmon DNS to the company from which we have bought it. More here.
• If we don’t have any domain, we invent any one and ready. The difference will be that we will work in a temporary “mialias” domain, as we will see below.

We click on the “Create Test Platform” button and that’s it, we already have it set up. How we invented the domain (which does not exist, come on)we will see this message:

This means that instead of using the test-domain-cd-mon.comwe will use the “temporary” domain test-domain-cd-mon.com.mialias.netwhich is actually a subdomain of mialias.net. Obviously, all this is temporary, because when we launch the web and buy the domain this will disappear.

This testing platform can last as long as we want, indefinitely. But yes, we must renew it every month. Thus, monthly we will receive an email notifying us, and asking if we want to renew. I have clients who have been using it for a year, without any problem.

Now we just have to give the link “Access the configuration of xxx.com”, and we already have everything ready.

cdmon control panel

Well, once we have accessed, we already have the control panel, absolutely complete and without limitations of any kind:

From this moment on, we can now operate normally. Perhaps one of the first things we want to do will be . If you want to see how, take a look at , in which you see how to do all this step by step through video tutorials in real time.

But since this tutorial is not about installing WordPress, but about how to use a test hosting, we will go through it quickly in two steps:

First, we create a new database

And then we install WordPress in the root:

And done. CDmon tells us that everything is ready

Yes sir, we already have everything installed. A functional and perfectly operational WordPress. But wait… Do we have any limitations? If not, why never pay for hosting, if we can renew every month indefinitely?

Limitations of the test platform

Indeed, we have a limitation. Our website, although fully functional, is under password. In other words, if we try to visit it, we will see this:

As you can see, we get a warning that says that the web is private, and that we need to enter a username and password. We have this data in the control panel that we have seen before:

And now yes, entering this data, we can access the web:

These access data are generic, meaning that you can share them among all the developers who are working on the web. Or if you are doing it for a client, you can give them access to see how the work evolves.

It is as if you had a “private WordPress”, fully functional. You can install plugins, themes, update it, etc. Neverthelessthink that being closed, other websites will not be able to access it.

This means that if, for example, we share a link on Facebook, it will not be able to read the page, because “doesn’t know the password”. Or if, for example, we set up an eCommerce with a bank’s POS, the bank will not be able to inform the eCommerce if the order has been paid correctly.

In short, everything that is “reading” our website will not be possible. Obviously, it will not be indexed in Google either. And in fact, that works fine for us, so that no content is indexed while we are developing 🙂

Summary and conclusion

If you want to develop your website in a hosting without paying for it until you launch it, I recommend the CDmon test platform.

We can use it for as long as we want, with the only limitation that our website will be “under password”. And thanks to the “mialias” service, you don’t even need to have a domain.

And if you want to see all this in step-by-step video tutorials, in real time, you already know that you can and will have access to . Take a look! 😉