Edit your hosts files (Windows)


Sometimes you might want to force your local machine to point a domain to another IP address without editing its public DNS entries.

You can do this by editing a file that is local to your PC, the "hosts" file - this is checked before any DNS lookups are performed.

  1. Click the Windows button.
  2. Type "Notepad" in the search field.
  3. When it appears inthe search results, right-click Notepad and choose to "Run as administrator"
  4. When in Notepad, now open the following file:"C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts"
  5. Add/Remove/Edit lines as needed and then File > Save

The format required for entries in to this file are like

[IP] domain.name

So to point your website to one of our shared hosting servers, you would add a line like this:

46.20.227.2 your-web-site.com


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