How To Block Websites on Any Browser Without Software

Written by Pavan Kumar on September 18, 2009

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Well, its time for change. We have always discussed about using proxy to open blocked websites or unblock twitter / other sites with proxy servers. There are serious cases when you need to block websites as there is a chance that your computer may be used by kids to browse internet. Always block inappropriate websites and safeguard your kid and / or your credit card 😉

how to block websites from accessing on internet

Though there are many commercial softwares available in the market, there are some problems associated with them. To be more particular, many of the softwares are not free and another fair reason is that software blocking can be easily undone if your kid knows which software is used to block sites. This is even worse if the software itself does not have a password lock.

Here is the most easy way to block any website from being accessed on any Windows computer, not just your kid, any non techie person cannot unblock it easily even though the trick is so easy and can be executed in a minute. Here we go with procedure.

Browse on your computer to following location which hold hosts file. Browse according to the OS you are using, the drive letter may change based on your OS installation. If you don’t find any such file, you might need to view hidden files.

Windows Vista C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC
Windows XP C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC
Windows 2K C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC

Hosts file has no extensions, so you have to force it open in Notepad or any other text editor.

Blocking websites on Windows

Once you have opened the file, you will find some details as shown above. Below you can find the IP address of localhost. Then, you add custom lines as below to block the websites of your choice.

127.0.0.1 badsite1.com
127.0.0.1 badsite2.com
127.0.0.1 badsite3.com

Blocking websites this way, makes it impossible to access blocked websites unless you are using an anonymizer service.

Also read: Block / Unblock images on Firefox, OpenDNS blocked websites, Browse blocked sites with DNS

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Category: internet

Tags: Block Bad Websites, Block Specific Website Trick, Block Websites on Windows Computer, How To Block Websites, Trick for Blocking Websites

8 Readers responded to this post

Even then its possible!
You can open “www.blockedsite.com” by typing “blockedsite.com” on your browser!
A tip for those who facing this problem 😀

By Deepak Jain on September 18th, 2009 at 2:52 am

@ Deepak,

Nice observation… may be one should consider blocking both www and non www versions of all sites. Best is to use OpenDNS and filter the entire category of inappropriate websites.

By Pavan Kumar on September 18th, 2009 at 12:22 pm

with out software website block tricks

pls help

By jack on September 30th, 2009 at 9:22 am

I see that there are a couple people trying to block my website from their “wi-fi hot spot” for campers camping at Eagle Lake for “inappropriate content”. This is a fishing report site not pornography. What reprocussions are there for fraudulent blocking under false pretences? Just wondering.
Thank you,
Val Aubrey
Publisher, Eagle Lake Fishing Information and Network

By Val Aubrey on October 3rd, 2009 at 8:25 pm

@ Val,

It is a local issue which you need to clear with the administrator. I feel its just a misunderstanding which resulted in blockage. My website was blocked by Open DNS and it could be sorted out within one day. You may be interested in reading my story:

http://www.techpavan.com/2009/07/14/website-blocked-opendns-wrong-category-unblocking-solutions/

By Pavan Kumar on October 4th, 2009 at 9:20 am

The instructions above do work very well for the non techie. But even a non techie can google a couple terms and figure out how to reverse the changes. Its probably best to have multiple logins to your machine and ensure the parent’s login is the one with admin rights. Without it you cannot change the host file back. If you find the instructions above hard to follow you can watch a point and click instruction video I made on how to complete them. It can be found here.

http://helpviavideo.com/watch.php?vidid=37.

It’s very basic. I’ll soon be adding instructions for the user rights as well.

Thanks

By Martin Sandbach on November 17th, 2009 at 2:52 am

Previously I had commented on blocking sites with the hosts file and I provided a video on how to block individual sites. Now I have created a much more advanced blocking technique where you can block entire content topics like adult, or nudity, or social networking, sports, blogging. It is also much more secure and harder to hack if you follow the instructions carefully. Please view the video here.

http://www.helpviavideo.com/watch.php?vidid=38

By Martin Sandbach on December 9th, 2009 at 3:22 am

Its not working.. plz update it

By hellboy on November 10th, 2010 at 12:18 am