Transitioning to a new host

I am currently on shared hosting and am hoping to transfer to a VPS. I have used an automated script to do the initial setup, having populated the various fields that the script presented.

I have read elsewhere that the best way to set up is to input everything into the new host (particularly domain names) as if the nameserver was pointing to the new site, and then edit the hosts file on my local windows machine so that it points to the IP of the new site, using the existing IP. The reason I did this was because I wanted the old site to continue running while I configured the new site.

The config of the VPS seemed to go well – I can login by SSH, see stuff by FTP, etc. I’ve also confirmed by running tracert on my machine that it does correctly resolve to the IP address for the new site.

Where things seem to break down is when I actually try to go to the site. When I type in x.com (I don’t use “www” for the existing site), I get the following error message: “Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): The connection was reset.”

When I type in the IP address, I see the default nginx welcome page which says “This is the default index.html page that is distributed with nginx on EPEL. It is located in /usr/share/nginx/html.”

In short, I can’t seem to access WordPress at all.

Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but when I tried to FTP in with the user that was supposed to be created by the script, I can login, but I can’t retrieve or overwrite wp-config, which has permissions set to 640 and ownership to www-group:www-group. This leads me to suspect that the user created by the script is not in the www-group group. Could that be what’s causing a problem?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be most appreciated