Problem Description
When visiting your Plesk Preview URL, rather than seeing the website you expect, you get a default Plesk / web server page.
Problem Resolution
Here's a few reasons why this can occur and how to fix it:
1. Not configured correctly in Plesk or missing wildcard DNS record
Firstly check to be sure the preview URL is set up correctly.
- For a shared or reseller hosting account: it will have <servername>.websavers.ca in the URL. If you don't see this, please open a ticket for us to correct it.
- For a VPS or dedicated server it should have your server's hostname in the URL. If it doesn't, head to Tools & Settings in Plesk and configure the URL accordingly. Then add the necessary wildcard DNS record to make this work — it will be a CNAME like `*.<hostname>` pointing to <hostname>. In natural language this means that all subdomains of your server's hostname are to share the same IP as the hostname.
2. This domain is not hosted on the sever's primary IP
If the wildcard DNS record is already set up, then the domain attempting to be previewed is probably configured on an IP that is not the primary IP for the server. The issue occurs because the wildcard DNS record points to the primary IP, but the web server is configured to respond on the secondary IP.
To fix this you need to add another wildcard DNS A record that is specifically for this IP address. Grab the preview URL from Plesk which will look something like the following where the numbers you see there are the same numbers used in the IP address, but they'll have dashes rather than dots between them here:
mydomain.com.111-22-33-44.<hostname>
Remove the mydomain.com part and replace it with a * then use that to create your wildcard record of type A pointing to the IP address (the correct version with the dots, not the dashes):
*.111-22-33-44.<hostname>
Wait for the change to take effect and you'll be all set.
---
Reminder: any DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to complete globally, but will likely take just a few hours for most locations.
