Why not use the conventional http://localhost:8081 rather than standing up new host names? If you are on xp then you can’t be running separate sites as IIS 5.1 is limited to a single site so it don’t matter so much.
It really matters really, its about friendliness of the url they are visiting, if you are end user, localhost:8081 is alien to them it looks geeky, they like more of cuteurlforcommoner/login.aspx something like that.
Assuming you have a DNS server somewhere pointing an url to your machine, all you have to do is add a header definition to the site in question. In IIS, right click the site you wish to edit, then click “Bindings”. You will see a dialog with various names and associated ports. Click “Add” to include a new definition. This is how name-based hosting works, and how IIS knows which “site” it should serve, based on the incoming request.
uh…all have a similar dialog, though the menu item names might not be the same. Just look through the contextual menus for a given site and look for Bindings.
Yes, DNS would work for any web server. It is just a way of mapping a name to an IP address. And it is the only way to do it. You going to need a domain name for each site