Testing a new account on a VPS

[fish_eye]

I am in the process of moving from reselling virtual hosting to VPS (yay!) and I'm also upgrading versions of PHP and MySQL at the same time so I want to test each site before I change the DNS.

The set up on the new VPS is Virtuozzo / WHM / cPanel.

In order to do the testing I create the account and I then access it using the url

http://host.foo.com/~newaccount

In my code I have things like this:

<?php include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/code/_top.html';?>

When I test I get the following error:

Unable to access /usr/local/apache/htdocs/code/_top.html in /home/newaccount/public_html/index.php on line 32

So.... I have tried to add s new document root to some existing code found in my httpd.conf. The first 3 lines and the last line are existing and the rest is new

<VirtualHost 999.999.999.999>
ServerName host.foo.com
DocumentRoot /usr/local/apache/htdocs
<Directory /home/newaccount>
DocumentRoot /home/newaccount/public_html
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

It breaks my VPS :(

1) Firstly, am I barking up the wrong tree? If so can you please point me in the right direction.

2) Secondly, if this is roughly correct what am I doing wrong?

Thanks, Sam.