There are many reasons why you may need to limit access to certain websites or entire areas of the web. Maybe you are a parent and you are trying to limit your children’s access to the web. Maybe you are running a school where you have to take the protection of minors into consideration. Maybe you own a company and you want to make sure that your employees are being efficient.
Whatever the case may be, it is useful to know the different ways to block access to websites. One way is to use software that will block access to all social media. This is a great method and there are many programs available to help you with that. For the purpose of this video, we will show you a free method that is build into Windows 10.
You will need to modify the host file on your computer. The host file is hard to find because in most cases you do not want to edit it. In order to do this you will need to open the start menu and type in “notepad”. Right click on the notepad icon and select “run as administrator” from the drop down menu. Once notepad is open, select the file menu and then select “open”. You will need to open your C drive, navigate to “Windows”, open “System 32”, then open the “Drivers” tab and you will see an “ect” tab. Here you will find the host file. In the bottom left corner of the open window you will see a drop down menu. Select “All files”. Open the host file.
From here you will be able to add in any websites that you do not want this computer to have access to. To do this you will want to redirect certain web searches to an unresolved DNS. This means that the search will return nothing. Simply type in 0.0.0.0 followed by the web address that you would like blocked and when the search engine recognizes this web address it will return a blank web page. You can add as may websites as you would like to this list. Before you leave don’t forget to save the edited host file.
