Hostess is a free utility for maintaining your HOSTS file. Unlike many HOSTS file utilities, Hostess is geared towards ad-blocking rather than IP address resolution. Hostess stores your host entries in a database that is indexed to eliminate duplicates and make searching fast and easy. It also allows you to group these hosts for efficiency and ease of maintenance.

Installing the program is also easy: just create a directory, extract the contents of the zip file into it and create a shortcut to Hostess.exe. No registry changes are made, and all program settings and data are stored in the program directory.

Messing with the HOSTS file is not for the inexperienced user. There is the possibility of undesirable and sometimes difficult to troubleshoot effects on your Internet and network connectivity. The documentation included with Hostess gives only a basic overview of how the HOSTS file works. Better sources of such information can be found by doing a web search for "HOSTS file". Hostess has been designed to make things easy for the experienced HOSTS jockey, someone that wants a fine degree of control over what goes into (and stays out of) their HOSTS file.

Recent Revisions

Sunday, March 23, 2008 - Hostess 4.1: Hostess now supports imports and exports in plain text format! The command line options were reworked to allow for the new features, and the menu shortcuts were updated so they don't conflict with common text editing shortcuts like Ctrl-V for Paste.
Monday, February 11, 2008 - Hostess 4.020: You can now create a Restricted Zone REGEDIT4 uninstall file at the same time as the install file. A couple of under-the-hood improvements were made, too.
Friday, December 21, 2007 - Hostess 4.010: I statically linked the parts I needed from midas.dll into the program, making it no longer necessary. You can delete the dll (from the Hostess directory) after upgrading.
Monday, December 10, 2007 - Hostess 4.001: Fixed some help typos and removed some performance testing code I left in the registry file creation.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007 - Vista feedback wanted: I still haven't heard from any Vista users whether the requireAdministrator manifest I linked in makes things any easier for you. I am also curious to hear from anybody that uses themes, in Vista or XP. Send me a screenshot if anything looks wacky (or exceptionally cool)!
Saturday, November 24, 2007 - Hostess 4.0 Released: Hostess 4.0 has been in beta for two months and is now ready for general release. Over the course of the beta, I received one (1!) bug report, and a number of good feature ideas, some of which have been incorporated into the program. This release marks the end of the line for Hostess 3.1. See the What's New in 4.0 section of the main Help page for a summary of the biggest changes since v3.

Download

If you are upgrading from a previous version of Hostess (beta or 3.x) be sure to read the special upgrade instructions in the help or readme.txt!

hostess41.zip: Hostess 4.100, 2008-03-23 - 895K
Unzip using folder names - the html-based help lives in a subdirectory.
edexgif.zip: My homemade images for eDexter. Very small, yet they scale well - 7K