<story><title>Xip.io: Wildcard DNS for everyone</title><url>http://xip.io</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Piskvorrr</author><text>Perhaps I am missing something - what problem does this solve? Instead of an IPv4 address, you are now entering (optional) prefix, the IPv4 address, and a postfix &amp;quot;.xip.io&amp;quot; Where is the added value over entering the IP address directly?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>binarymax</author><text>This is very useful for me, because lots of the software I write is SaaS where the customer has their own subdomain - and testing on mobile in a local network is a PITA.&lt;p&gt;Think of setting acme.example.local and foo.example.local in hosts to 127.0.0.1.  In my code I have middleware that sniffs the leftmost part of the hostname and authenticates and routes based on that info.&lt;p&gt;With this I don&amp;#x27;t need to mess with hosts, and I don&amp;#x27;t need to worry about putting in a hack for mobile (on which you cannot change any hosts).</text></comment>
<story><title>Xip.io: Wildcard DNS for everyone</title><url>http://xip.io</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Piskvorrr</author><text>Perhaps I am missing something - what problem does this solve? Instead of an IPv4 address, you are now entering (optional) prefix, the IPv4 address, and a postfix &amp;quot;.xip.io&amp;quot; Where is the added value over entering the IP address directly?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bluefinity</author><text>You can set up your web server to serve different applications on different domains if you&amp;#x27;re working on multiple projects at the same time and don&amp;#x27;t want to put them on different ports or use subdirectories.&lt;p&gt;Another use case I can see is for testing subdomain-based web apps where you give each customer a subdomain (really just a wildcard dns record), e.g. acme.myapp.com</text></comment>