The Hosts File and What It Can Do For You
http://yanhuang.me/2013/02/23/hosts-f... - The hosts file is a file on every computer that controls the mapping of hostnames or domain names to IP addresses. What this means is that if I edited this file on my computer and pointed paypal.com to 127.0.0.1 and had a blank page on 127.0.0.1, when I go to paypal.com in the web browser, it will show up as a blank page. The primary advantage of this for web developers and programmers is that during a website migration, you can get the website working properly on the new server by editing the hosts file to point to the new server's IP, and this alleviates the need to change the DNS for quality assurance.
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