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Editing Hosts files - how to block or redirect websites!

Let's learn today about Hosts files and how to use them to block or redirect websites.
For a more detailed explanation visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file and read about it. You can find there also the location of the hosts file in the system files, since it depends on your operating system. In Windows 7 click Start - Run then the path is: c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
To explain it briefly, a hosts file is a computer file used in an operating system to map hostnames to IP addresses and it's a plain text file.

# This is an example of the hosts file
127.0.0.1 localhost loopback
::1 localhost


In the video you will see how you can block access to a site or redirect it using the hosts file. To redirect a website you will need the IP of the site you want to be redirected to. An easy example is to redirect yahoo.com to google.com. But how do you find google's IP? Click Start, type cmd - this will open command prompt. Type ping google.com. This will show you Google.com's IP; all you need to do now is to type it in the hosts file like this:
127.0.0.1 google's IP www.yahoo.com
Don't forget to save the file.
To see a video tutorial about how to find out the IP adress of a website, you can check out this tutorial.
In the tutorial, instead of ping we have used tracert command, these are both ways to find out a website's IP.
Coming back to our example, when you type in your internet browser www.yahoo.com, you will be redirected to google.com.
You can change it back anytime by opening the hosts file again and deleting the changes you have made.
You can search our site and find also a tutorial on how to open blocked websites. Good luck!