hmm, it does not seem to work here. This is what I have so far, but when I add www at the beginning of the hostname, it can't find it. I should note that I'm using a hostname from DynDNS but I doubt that's an issue since I have used lighttpd in the past and it successfully rewrites

server {
listen *:8080 default_server;
server_name _;
return 444;
}

server {
server_name xxx.xxx.xxx;
listen *:8080 rcvbuf=64k backlog=128;
limit_conn gulag 5;
charset utf-8;
access_log /var/log/nginx/xxx.access.log;
root /srv/www/htdocs/xxx.xxx.xxx;
location / {
index index.php;
}