I don’t see what the difference is. You use a string, which can either be “localhost” or “127.0.0.1” or you have a string that is the DNS name of your server. At some point you have to change your local name to your remote name, and if the name is just a string it shouldn’t matter what it is.
If you’re going to be changing it or not I would use something like:
local useLocalHost = true
local host = "http://myremoteserver.com"
if useLocalHost then
host = “127.0.0.1”
end
Then just use the variable host in your code. You can quickly toggle that flag on and off depending on where you want to test.