Good way to notify staff that they are on the dev server?

Question

Looking for a clever way to identify the dev server to staffers who are making updates to the website.

Our setup is like this: Live and Dev servers have different IP's, and staff switches their hosts file to make updates to either Live or Dev site.

Since the address looks the same, and the hosts file just works behind the scenes, sometimes people forget which server they're on and update the wrong one. I'm looking for a smart way, or best practice, for making some kind of notification that users are on the dev server, that doesn't affect the URL.

Answer 1

each server must have its own database, right? You could have something like a big banner or a slightly different color scheme for the app in the dev environment, so they know (hope no one in the team is color blind).