We found it much easier to pay the extra money for a wildcard cert and use that cert on dev/staging/etc and use subdomains for the various rigs. The only downsi

We found it much easier to pay the extra money for a wildcard cert and use that cert on dev/staging/etc and use subdomains for the various rigs. The only downside is that more people have access to your certs, which isn't a problem with a small team and could be mitigated by buying a throwaway cert for a different domain used for dev/staging. The time wasted by having each developer twiddle hosts files, blessing self-signed certs, etc is far more expensive than the cost of the (extra) wildcard cert, not to mention it keeps all of your environments the same which also saves time/money.