Free Wildcard DNS Service
If you’ve worked at a web development company with many clients I’m sure you’ve had a bunch of different domains for each of the various sites. Creating the DNS entries for each of the different sites can be a pain, and after a while I’m sure you get to the point where trying to cleanup unused DNS entries would be a nightmare.
That’s where a free service like xip.io comes in. It is a “magic domain” that serves as a wildcard DNS entry for any IP address you want. Basically in the URL you just have to specify the IP you want it to point to. This is what the format looks like:
- 10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
- www.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
- mysite.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
- foo.bar.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
The cool thing is that there is absolutely no configuration needed for any of this to work. Basically the DNS server will pull the IP address from the URL, and return it to your browser. If you’re a system administrator that manages the DNS for your company that would mean you’d no longer need to create DNS entries for your developers, which can save a huge amount of time if you have new sites always popping up.
The service is completely free and you can start using it without ever even visiting the xip.io site. A big thanks to the fine people over at 37signals for putting this together.
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