The Hostess program has been designed to help you easily maintain your HOSTS file, primarily for the purpose of blocking servers that contain unwanted or malicious content. It stores the hostnames in an indexed database, eliminating duplicates and placing hosts into logical groups that can be ordered for efficiency. Hostess has powerful import, export and search features. It can even create a registry file for adding domains to Internet Explorer's Restricted Zone.
The HOSTS file is used by your operating system as a quick way of resolving hostnames (www.example.com) into IP addresses (123.234.1.2) without the need to request a lookup from an external DNS server. Normally, when you type a hostname into your browser, your DNS server (usually specified by your ISP) is queried to obtain the IP address. If a HOSTS file is present, it takes precedence over an external DNS server and is used first.
The primary focus of Hostess is on maintaining a list of hosts that you wish to block in order to avoid the bandwidth-hogging download of advertising graphics. The HOSTS file can be used to block hosts by supplying an address that points to the local machine instead of an actual external IP address. The IP address 127.0.0.1 refers to the local computer, or localhost; the same computer the request originated from. Unless you are actually running a web server on your computer, any requests redirected to localhost will fail! These failed requests mean that the advertising graphics don't get downloaded and your pages load much faster.
The original, intended purpose of the HOSTS file is to store the addresses and give human-friendly names to resources on your LAN that don't have entries in an external DNS server. Common examples of such a use would be making entries for the configuration addresses of your router or cable modem. Hostess makes it easy to do this as well by separating hosts into two categories - Good hosts and Bad hosts. Good hosts have an actual IP address associated with them, Bad Hosts do not.
Some people use the HOSTS file to store the IP addresses of their favorite Internet servers as a speed boost by eliminating the need for a DNS lookup. Due to the dynamic nature of IP addresses, the author of this program does not recommend such a use for the HOSTS file. Whatever time you may have saved by avoiding these DNS lookups will be lost many times over the first time you try to determine why you can't get to your favorite site because the IP address has changed.
A note on terminology: When I write "HOSTS" in all upper case, I am referring to the system's actual HOSTS file. When I use "hosts" in lower/mixed case, I am referring to the host names of computers on the Internet, in your Hostess database, or in a text file.
Context-sensitive help can be reached from any screen in the program by pressing the F1 key.
Hostess 4.0 was rewritten from scratch and should generally be faster than 3.x during every operation. Some of the highlights of the new verison are:
Hostess 4.1 added just one new feature, but it's significant enough to rate as a point release: You can now import and export files in plain-text format! Originally, all imports and exports had to be in HOSTS-format, the same layout as a regular HOSTS file. Now you can import or export text files that contain only hostnames, one per line.
For the latest news and updates, visit the website at www.raymarron.com/hostess/.
For email support, send a message to hostess@raymarron.com. Better yet, use the email link from Hostess' About box - it will include the full version number in the subject of the email.