I'm having trouble setting up a clean development environment with all the web sites I'm working on. I'm working on up to 40 different web sites, and at least 5 of them simultaneously. I need them all to be in a site root, for URL management to work with all CMSes.

My first attempt was to use increasing port numbers for them, beginning with localhost:1000 and working upwards. Unfortunately, it took a great deal of looking up which port belonged to which web site, and it was very irritating.

My second try was mapping the irritating ports to real words using the hosts file. So I ended up with localhost.tele2, localhost.ikea, localhost.volvo etc. Unfortunately, this takes a long time to set up (cleaning and adding to the hosts file, setting web site with highest port number in IIS etc.) and regularly I have to flush the DNS cache in order to get some sites working that I've added/removed from the hosts file.

So how do I organize a lot of web sites in IIS7 nicely? Perhaps I've missed a very clever method that you're using.