Why is xip io needed when I can access the IP directly?

Question

xip.io welcome screens says this :

10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1

Why do we need to go through xip io when I can directly use the IP?

Is it used to access servers by domain name instead of IP?

Answer 1

The main use case is when your application needs to support multiple subdomains.

Take for example these production subdomains:

• www.example.com
• admin.example.com
• members.example.com

Or you can consider a multi-tenant application where each account gets its own custom subdomain:

• mycompany.example.com
• anotherguy.example.com

So it's easy enough to setup a production environment to serve this requests.

But without a service like xip.io for your development environment, you cannot put a subdomain in front of an IP address to route your request appropriately.

To get around this, you can access your application through a subdomain like this through xip.io:

http://mycompany.10.0.0.1.xip.io/ 

As xip.io states, this then works flawlessly if you're trying to access the application from other machines on your local network, be they smartphones, tablets, other OSes within VMs, etc.