Restrict Website Access

Here is how you can block access to any website you want. This is useful if you have children and want to make sure they aren't doing anything bad on the internet. ;)


Windows has a file called "hosts" in this location:

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

Once you are in the folder "etc", copy the file "hosts" into two separate folders. (I chose my desktop and my documents folder)

Now open the hosts file in one of the folders by double-clicking it and choosing to open in notepad. (The other file will be used as a backup in case you totally mess this up [which would be quite hard to do since it's really simple!])

This is what mine looks like:

(Click the picture for a larger view)


As you can see, I added "twitter.com" to the bottom.

Find where this would be on yours (it should be under "localhost", probably at the bottom, but some are different), and add a site like I did.

First put "127.0.0.1", then tab over and put what sites you want to block. Every site will have their own line with their own "127.0.0.1" to the left.

Now when you are done, just copy this new file (make sure its called "hosts" [no quotes]) into the location it should be in:

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

Confirm that you want to replace the file.

Now try and go to that site you blocked. It should return a connection error. You did it right.

What this does is severs the connection to twitter.com and your internet connection doesn't know how to connect to the website. The hosts file is telling the browser that twitter.com is 127.0.0.1 (the local system) and not the actual IP address of the site.