How to hide a Kentico staging site from the public

Question

Is limiting access to a Kentico staging site by IP address the best way to hide it from the public?

We're finishing up a Kentico 11 site, and setting up Content Staging:

• from our internal dev site to an externally hosted staging site, and
• from the staging site to a production site on the same server.

We could require users to be logged in to Kentico in order to view the staging site, but my concerns are that:

1. This might only prevent dynamic content from being shown - static resources might still be accessible, and
2. The setting requiring users to be logged in to see anything might make its way to the production server via Content Staging.

Thank you in advance for any feedback.

Answer 1

There are a couple options:

1. from a network point of view, if the hosting server is something you control in your network, you can make it where the server itself is not available publicly online and require a VPN connection to even see the server.

2. there is the basic 'give it a weird sub domain and require host file entry to see it' approach, this is where you basically make it impossible to find/view the server unless someone is told the domain the site is expecting and the IP of the server itself. On the live site if you want to enable staging from live to staging you need a host file entry in the live server to.

3. You can use the whitelist IP setting in Kentico, just have to be careful that setting doesn't push (delete the staging task and never full sync the IP restriction module).

May be others but that's what I've seen.