One can easily modify the Hosts file in early Windows operating systems by the ‘ edit ’ command in command prompt. You just need to open the command prompt windows with “ Administrator ” privilege and go to the location of the Hosts file and edit it by using ‘edit’ command. But, this procedure doesn’t work on Windows 8.1 and 10. Instructions How To Register 1. Download Filmora Trail From its Official Website.
As a field expert, people often ask me how to improve websites’ performance. Sometimes, they also ask me how to improve the Web’s performance on their own machine, for their own browsing experience. In that case, my answer is always the same: the lowest hanging fruit is most certainly the hosts file.
Keeping the dirt away
Today’s web is full of dirt. Most sites are full of trackers, ads, and lots of other nasty stuff penalizing websites’ loading. To avoid this, AdBlockers are blooming. They offer a quick and simple solution (most of the time, a browser extension) that blocks most of the unwanted content.
Unfortunately, as for the UX, AdBlockers don’t deliver. They often increase the amount of memory and CPU cycles used by your web browser, slowing your browsing experience instead of boosting it. Some are doing better than others, and whole browsers1 have been conceived over the idea of blocking unwanted content, and are doing an incredible job. But the web is not confined to your browser, is it?
The Web is requested from everywhere in your computer. Most mainstream applications are as crammed with trackers as your next media website. Sometimes, you can even see the ads displayed in your UI (Hello, Skype. Yes, I’m talking about you, you naughty boy).
The AdBlockers can’t do anything about that. But a simple hosts file does.
Hosts… what?
The computer file hosts is an operating system file that maps hostnames to IP addresses. It is a plain text file. ”hosts (file)”, on Wikipedia
Whenever your browser interacts with a website, it actually requests a server, located through its IP address, like 185.31.40.11 (IPv4) or 2a00:b6e0:1:20:2::1 (IPv6). It’s pretty similar to a postal address.
Now think about accessing a webpage, like https://boris.schapira.dev. How does your browser know which IP address to contact? Well, the browser simply asks the Internet phone book. At least, one of them. And the phone book, called a DNS, resolves the IP address for the browser.
I don’t know about you, but I never use a phone book. Most of the time, I’ve collected the address of the people to whom I want to write in my personal address book. That’s the hosts file for you. Every time a process on your computer needs to access a resource on the Internet, it first goes through the hosts file to find out where to find it.
Now, let’s say that you don’t want this process to find the resource on the badthings.com domain. Easy peasy, throw it on the wrong track by associating the badthings.com domain to an unspecified address like 0.0.0.0.
So basically, if someone makes a list of all the domains where bad things happen, we can redirect them all to 0.0.0.0 in our hosts file, and make our own Web a much cooler place.
One project to gather them all
There is nothing new in what I am describing here. Cool people have been doing this for years, sharing their host files. Fake news websites, gaming platforms, pornographic hubs, encryption pages, fraud attempts, and scams are all patiently identified and listed in open access files.
I use Steven Black’s “hosts” project, a python script, to cram them into a single 2MB hosts file containing more than 70k domains. In case you’re wondering, I can and do alter the result with my own accept list (otherwise blocked domains whose requests I don’t want to prevent) and redirections (which allows me to write this article and check the result on https://borisschapira-dev.com:10443/, which actually points to my own machine).
If you’re not familiar with the command line and use Windows 10, the hostsman app will help you achieve the same goal (unfortunately, as I just published the post, the website looks down. Fortunately, a portable version exists).
I will not recommend modifying your host file on previous versions of Windows even if I did it, before 2015 (FR), unless you like to run ipconfig /flushdns every 30 minutes. On Linux, I’ve heard people talk about using dnscrypt-proxy… but I’ve never tried myself.
Some tips from my daily life
Sometimes, I need to temporaly disable this hosts file. For example, when I need to help Dareboost clients understand the impact of third-party scripts on their pages (thus, I need to load these 3ps myself).
To enable or disable my hosts file, I use a command line function that I’ve develop and put in my ~/.profile file[^ozsh]: [^ozsh]: Actually, I put this function in my ~/.zprofile, as I use Oh My ZSH.
Once this function is loaded, activating or deactivating my hosts file is very simple:
But as I sometimes forget to put it back in place, I have set up a routine that checks every minute that the file is in place and, if it is not the case, warns me by using Jaime Piña’s noti to trigger a notification. To perform this regular check, I use crontab.
Host File Block List
I have been using this technique for years now and, sometimes, I forget that my hosts file protects me so much. Whenever I need to use someone else’s computer, or temporarily disable my hosts file, I realize the level of comfort it provides me.
I’m well aware that tweaking its own hosts file is a good but technical solution. It doesn’t completely replace an AdBlocker (or I haven’t aggregated enough files yet) but it’s an incredible performance gain, which I highly recommend for everyday browsing.
Try it for yourself, and tell me what you think!
Summary
Hosts files are your computer internal address books that guide Web requests to the right servers. Fill your hosts file with domains pointing to nothingness, and those requests will quickly and surely fail. People are sharing their hosts file for years. Solutions now exist to concatenate them, and crowdsource a solution to the dirty Web we’ve to deal with everyday.
Bonus
Some great alternatives to localhost:
And many others on Emojipedia
If you’ve never tested Brave Browser, I can only encourage you to do so, and join the 4 million people that trust it to fix the web. ↩
DNS, which stands for Domain Name System, can convert the elusive IPv4 or IPv6 addresses to meaningful names, and then translate the characters back to IP addresses. For example, when you want to visit a website, DNS will tell your web browser the real IP address of it, and then web browser will download the web page directly from that IP address.
As you may expect, the process of translating IP addresses to website names will consume some time, which could cause access delay. Particularly, if the DNS servers are down, you will not be able to visit most websites through their URL, which isn’t uncommon.
Hence, it is necessary to make a list for mapping hostnames to IP addresses. That is what Windows HOSTS file does. On most Windows systems, the HOSTS file content is used preferentially over other methods, such as the DNS.
With the proper use of Windows HOSTS file, you can accelerate the access speed of favorite websites, test a website locally and even selectively block certain websites (Image by technet).
In fact, blocking websites through the HOSTS file is an effective way to do it because it blocks it across all the browsers (we’ve previously discussed methods to block sites in Internet explorer and Google Chrome).
This article has some tips to manage the HOSTS file and block websites with it. The two methods I’ll discuss here are:-
- How to manually edit the HOSTS file.
- How to use a tool called HostsMan editor to do it easily.
1. Edit HOSTS File Manually
Windows NT platform systems including Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 7 have their HOSTS file in the path %SystemRoot%system32driversetc (“%SystemRoot%” is relative path, which depends on the system-wide environment variable, it should be C:Windows or C:WINNT in most cases).
Hosts File Download
Basically, you just need to type the above mentioned path in Windows search bar (or run box) to get to the “etc” folder where you’ll find the HOSTS file.
You can use any text editor to open the file and edit it manually.
Note: For Windows 7 users, there’s one more step. Type “Notepad” in Start Menu search bar, and then right click on the “Notepad” item, choose “Run as administrator”. Now you can open HOSTS file with “File -> Open” menu in notepad.
The HOSTS file contains lines of text including an IP address and one or more hostnames. You can add the mapping relationship of each websites. The comment lines are indicated by a hash (#) character, which will be ignored by system.
To block a website, simply add a line like this:
127.0.0.1 example.com
127.0.0.1 (or Localhost) is the standard hostname given to the address of your computer. You mapped the website name to your PC, hence you can’t visit the site any more. So if you want to block Facebook, just add this line: 127.0.0.1 facebook.com
2. Edit HOSTS File with HostsMan Editor
HostsMan Editor (via cybernet news ) provides a sleek interface for managing your HOSTS file. If you are going to use your HOSTS file often, I recommend you use this tool.
As you see in the screenshot above, the add button can let you add the sites you want to block. You just need to map them to the localhost IP.
You can add, delete or temporarily disable the items with this tiny tool. What’s more, it can list potential risks items in “Possible Hijacks” section.
So that was about how to make use of the HOSTS file in Windows to block websites.
Also check our review of OpenDNS, another way to filter the websites that get accessed on your computer.
The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.Also See#privacy #security
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