[ryanlm]

I use a subdomain of a domain I own, such as internal.example.com

I can then run a BIND instance with internal.example.com as a root, then map all my services to their own domain if need be.

This is a little overkill for a one man shop, but it's a nice little home development setup.

The one thing you need to configure, if you want it to work out of the box is that your DHCP server needs to send back the IP address of your local BIND service for DNS, else it won't work right and you'll need to manually configure it every time.

An example of where this worked well for me was when I was using one nginx instance to run snapshots of all my clients websites. With nginx, you can set up "virtual hosts" which map a hostname to a configuration block. You could also just edit your /etc/hosts file to accomplish the same thing I guess.

[btgeekboy]

I do something similar. My home network's recursive DNS server is a local install of Unbound. Setting local overrides there is very easy, though I don't use it in a hierarchical format. (Unbound refers to these as local-data.)