Host file local host

Changing your hosts file is a temporary measure to preview your site as it will load from your HostGator server. It lets you make changes on a server other than the one loaded by your domain when visitors access your page.

Hosts File is handy for development purposes, as you can work on your site on an alternate server using a hosts file while visitors may still visit and use your existing site. To change the host your domain loads from, you need to know your server's correct IP. HostGator servers will require you to use the IP address displayed in your cPanel. You can view your Site IP by accessing your cPanel and looking within the General Information section in your right-hand sidebar:.

Lastly, you may change the host your local computer loads your website from by directly editing your system's hosts file. This method will be more straightforward if you are an experienced user of your local PC's operating system. You may deactivate a line to undo this change by prefacing it with a as in the third line above. It will cause the line to be ignored.

Click the links below to expand specific instructions on how to make this change your desired operating system:.

You may also need to reboot for the change to take effect. The next time you visit your domain, your browser will try to find the domain at the corresponding IP instead of looking up the IP through DNS.

Most distributions of Unix will have terminal located in the same location. Once you have modified your hosts file, it is recommended that you flush your DNS so that the new changes can be implemented more swiftly.

DNS flushing must be done using the command line. One important reason to add entries to your hosts file is speed. It will always be faster to do a local lookup than going out to an external server. Especially if that server is unreliable. Putting your most important or most frequently used sites in the hosts file means you never have to worry about your DNS service causing access issues.

You can also use the hosts file to block sites that you never want that computer to access. Common redirections include 0. Check out our YouTube video for more details on that. If you have local devices such as routers, IP cameras, network-attached storage and so on, you can use your hosts file to give their IP addresses an easy to remember name. The good news is that there are plenty of places on the web where you can find pre-made lists that you can simply copy and paste into your own hosts file.

The main problem with this is that there could be malicious reroutes hidden in these lists. Which means you either need to verify each IP address by hand or make sure that you trust the source of the list. In ansible, host files are those files that are used for storing information about remote nodes information, which we need to manage.

This file can be placed anywhere but its location needs to be set up either in a configuration file or give on the command line. This is one of those important files without which you will be doing a lot of extra work to tackle it.

You can set your default hosts file location in it. Those files will be realized by Ansible in alphabetical order of their file names. In such cases, values set in configuration files have lower precedence. Both of the above have different advantages over others, but both work fine in all cases and easy to reuse, read, and modify. Also, it is easy to maintain. Few variables control the behavior of connection with remote hosts from the Ansible control server.