We're currently in the process of rethinking our development setup. This (of course) includes a test environment in which our customers can test our software.
Now for SharePoint, theres a bit of an issue on hosted sites. We have a shared hosting environment which is setup to be multitenant. The site uses host header site collection, thus site which carry their own full URL.
For a proper test, I want to be able to restore my production database in my test environment. Of course I can do that, but due to the URLs, I can only visit those sites when I alter the hosts file on the client computer. That's annoying and can easily cause issues.
In a best case scenario, I would like to set it up like this: - Production is running www.livesite.com - Testing automatically becomes www.testsite.com - Development becomes www.devsite.com
Basically, IIS on the test server should internally rewrite every request to www.testsite.com to www.livesite.com, and replace www.livesite.com with www.testsite.com in the output again. That way, SharePoint still believes it's living on www.livesite.com while my users can visit www.testsite.com. I hope this still makes sence :)
So now the questions are: Is this possible? Is is supported? What's the best way to do it?