Multiple localhost:80-bound sites in IIS?

Question

(You can skip directly to the question, but the context is on the background section.)

Technical Context

• Windows 8
• IIS 7

Answer 1

Your hosts file needs to match your IIS bindings, which have to match the url browser.

So if your hosts file looks like:

127.0.0.1 siteA.localhost
127.0.0.1 siteB.localhost

Your IIS bindings need to be:

site    host header       port
siteA   siteA.localhost   80
siteB   siteB.localhost   80

Finally, from the local machine, you need to browse to:

http://siteA.localhost

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EDIT - If you are trying to do the above without adding the hosts entries for siteA and siteB, it won't work. DNS won't find it. So for example, what happens if you try to browse to "foo.stackoverflow.com" - the request will fail even though "stackoverflow.com" is a known address.