Website Development moving to Image Hosting

We are moving over to using Akamai for all of our large static content so far just flash but are planning to include images, css, and js files in that list.

I am curious what methods others employ to switch all of their local/relative paths to using an external hosting company. Also, how they continue to develop their site so that developers can make changes in development without it having to be pushed to their external开发者_开发问答 hosting servers.

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i know this question is months old. how you though about just setting up your hosts file to just point the domainname of you CDN to your local machine?