How to block any website on Windows PC

How to block any website on Windows PC

The other day I received a mail from my reader Venugopal, asking me to help out with a peculiar problem - how to block a website on Windows PC so that no one could access it without his permission? You see he had saved all his passwords in his browser and someone in his family had used his PayPal credentials to pay up for a product in an online purchase. Seeing that it was done for a children's product he guessed that it was done by his teen kid who wanted to buy something which would have 'officially' not been approved. So he wants to know if the PayPal site can be blocked in that PC thereby avoiding a conflict.

Here is my reply to him:  Yes, Venu, fortunately there is a way to do it and it is very simple. And it has to do with adding a single line to a Windows file named Hosts.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Log in to Windows using your Administrator account that has Administrator privileges. Usually the one you boot into Windows is an Administrator account by default. I'll tell you why this is important in point number 7 below.
2. Open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc. then double-click the Hosts file. Select Notepad as the program to open it with.  
3. Make a backup of the Hosts file before doing anything else (just in case anything goes wrong) by copying the contents of that file in a new notepad file and saving it in your regular place like 'My Documents' or 'Desktop'.
4. Now in that Hosts file in notepad, go to the end of the very last line in the file, then press the Enter key to create a new line.
5. Type 127.0.0.1 then press the space bar. Now type the URL of the website you wish to block (in this case www.PayPal.com). 
6. Here, you could repeat steps 4 and 5 in order to block other websites in addition to www.PayPal.com. 
7. Click File > Save as, then click the Save button to save the modified hosts file. Here if you are not an Administrator, you will not be able to save it as it is a system file.
8. Restart your PC, then check to see if your can get to the www.PayPal.com website. If all steps were done correctly, you won’t be able to access it with any web browser.

Here’s a screenshot:

Note: This tip will work for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 8 as well. 

I suggest you might to consider placing a password on your Administrator account as otherwise anyone can simply undo the block from the Hosts file with a simple Google search. If you password protect your PC, no one will be able to alter the Hosts file to remove the line(s) you added.