Multiple Website Development on Windows XP Pro

Did you know that you can develop multiple websites on Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Pro? Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional have removed the menu to create multiple websites in Internet Information Services. But using a command-line interface you can still create multiple websites. Though you are only able to have one running at a time.

To do this...

1. Type in a cmd.exe console "CScript.exe C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs ENUM /P W3SVC" to find the highest number of your existing websites. Should be "1".
2. Next you will copy an existing website to a new website by typing: "Cscript.exe C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs COPY W3SVC/1 W3SVC/2" where 2 is the next number of the website.

You can also change the loopback IP addresses in the "%windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts" file. 127.0.0.x are called loopback IPs and will return to your local computer. This way you can access your web site by an ip address or by a domain name.