What's the best (read: least fiddling about in registry, etc) way to allow a Windows Server (I'm using 2008 R2) to access a site it hosts through the domain name e.g. www.example.com?
Editing the hosts file was the first thing I tried, however, it did not work.
Have you tried simply tweaking the hosts file so the domain name resolves to the machine's IP? That would be the simplest solution I'd try for one idea. If this doesn't work and you did reboot, I'd investigate firewall issues here as there shouldn't be any problem with the server resolving itself at that point.
The alternative would be to point the server to some DNS servers though this does present more configuration and possible snags in terms of security issues.
