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I've modified the HOSTS file on my Windows 7 machine in exactly the same manner as I have in the past on my Vista and XP machines; however it has had no effect.

How do you redirect URLs in Windows 7 or enable the HOSTS file so that it acts as it did in the previous versions of Windows?

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    Please post your hosts file
    – user1931
    Sep 26, 2010 at 21:02
  • 1
    Can you give a specific example? What is the configuration, what steps do you take to test it, what do you expect to happen, and what actually happens?
    – Stephen Jennings
    Sep 26, 2010 at 23:41
  • I second post your hosts file. Also try the hosts file on the XP machine where the other hosts file works.
    – Andrew J. Brehm
    Nov 22, 2010 at 9:37
  • Make sure you haven't saved hosts files as hosts.txt accidentally..! Small thing but worth checking.
    – user207952
    Mar 17, 2013 at 6:02

4 Answers 4

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For Windows 7,

  1. Open Notepad in Run as Administrator mode.

  2. Now you can see these lines...

    # localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
#    127.0.0.1           localhost
#    ::1                 localhost

  3. Add new line for your domain.

  4. After the change it will be like this...

    # localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
#      127.0.0.1             localhost
#      ::1                   localhost
       10.40.0.9             xxx.com  
       10.40.0.10            yyy.com

  5. Now save the hosts file. If it prompts to save it elsewhere then you forgot to open Notepad as administartor.

  6. Go to Windows' command promt and run this command ipconfig /flushdns
  7. Open your browser and try to browse xxx.com and yyy.com etc. Should work fine.

Note to remove '#' sign, because 127.0.0.1 doesn't require the hosts file to resolve and the '#' sign denotes a comment line.

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    Please, please take a moment to read the formatting/Markdown help and keep it simple instead of unwanted garbage HTML
    – Sathyajith Bhat ♦
    Jul 12, 2012 at 19:07
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    Upvote because this is the right way to do it.
    – Rob
    Jul 12, 2012 at 19:11
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Have you tried running an IPCONFIG /Flushdns?

It may be that Windows 7 caches the lookups in a different way to older versions, leading to slightly different behaviour.

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  • Yes, I've tried that amongst many other things. I've currently NO idea why the HOSTS file seems to be completely ignored in W7.
    – Sootah
    Sep 26, 2010 at 22:42
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Totally forgot about this open question. As it turns out, if you copy the contents of the file, paste it into a new Notepad, delete the original file, and then save HOSTS again to C:|Windows\System32\Drivers\etc then it works.

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    This is NOT the standard way when editing the hosts file, you don't need to copy and paste the contents like that. Not every time, anyway.
    – TFM
    Mar 17, 2013 at 6:42
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According to Microsoft, the DNS resolution order has not changed.

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