I'm converting a site from an ASP shopping cart to Magento. I had to switch hosts to a php server. A lot of the configurations I'm testing require that I have the site hosted on the domain (SSL, module keys, etc). 

I set up the new host, have everything set up database and magento wise. But I wanted to know if there was a way to have a landing page on the root while working on magento site on the live url. so if you go to example.com it takes you to the landing page (index.html) but I can bypass this by going to example.com/index.php.

I could put this on a subdomain but that is not ideal since I don't have an SSL cert on subdomains and some of the modules won't be activated on there as well.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as it is up right now and don't want users to see the beta site.

Thanks