Easy Ways of Blocking Websites
Blocking access to some websites is essential especially for those with children or multiple users at home. Many organizations also prevent their employees from accessing some specific websites in order to maintain sanity in the organization and all this can be achieved easily by using any of the numerous ways. You can also avail a business computer support to make website access restriction possible. Following are the steps to block unwanted websites or even internet access. Some of the steps involve router modification, some involve modification in DNS settings and some involve application of other types of filters. If you apply these methods in the user accounts, users will not be able to access the blocked sites or even the internet and they will also not be able to slip back the changes made by you as an administrator. Before going to apply these restrictions, the first thing you need to do is to create the standard and restricted user accounts of the people using the computer. In case you have no idea of how to create a user account, you can take help of Microsoft technical support.
Block the sites by editing the Hosts file:
Editing the hosts file is the quickest and easiest way of blocking websites irrespective of what internet browser you are using. It works in all windows based computers. Go to My Computer C:WindowsSystem32etc folder. Here you will find the .hosts file. Open the file by using WordPad or notepad application. You will be presented with the information containing some IP addresses and some site names which will look something like this: 127.0.0.1 Localhost. If you want to block a website like abcd.com, add this entry just below the localhost entry such as:
127.0.0.1 Localhost
127.0.0.1 http://www.abcd.com
You can add many websites this way and once you have finished adding the sites which need to be blocked from accessing, close the file after saving. Now to check if the sites are blocked, open the web browser and type he website name you have just added in to the hosts file. This technique will certainly work because the moment a user tries to open a website which you have blocked, the browser will look for the entry of the IP address associated with the site in the hosts file and if it finds the entry, it will give an error message and the site will not open. However, this technique has some limitations like there are many websites which are not known to you as it is not possible to get a list of all such unwanted sites.
Allow the websites instead of blocking them:
This technique is the most accurate one as it uses content advisor in IE. Once you enable it you have the option of allowing or disallowing any site as per your choice. If there are children at your home, you can specify which sites they can visit and block all other sites. To achieve this using internet explorer, open the explorer and go to tools Internet Options content tab and enable the content advisor. Now you can click and allow the appropriate websites while blocking all other sites for that particular user. Here you need to set a password so that the user cannot undo the changes. This way you can set different website access permissions for different users of the computer.
Block the sites by editing the Hosts file:
Editing the hosts file is the quickest and easiest way of blocking websites irrespective of what internet browser you are using. It works in all windows based computers. Go to My Computer C:WindowsSystem32etc folder. Here you will find the .hosts file. Open the file by using WordPad or notepad application. You will be presented with the information containing some IP addresses and some site names which will look something like this: 127.0.0.1 Localhost. If you want to block a website like abcd.com, add this entry just below the localhost entry such as:
127.0.0.1 Localhost
127.0.0.1 http://www.abcd.com
You can add many websites this way and once you have finished adding the sites which need to be blocked from accessing, close the file after saving. Now to check if the sites are blocked, open the web browser and type he website name you have just added in to the hosts file. This technique will certainly work because the moment a user tries to open a website which you have blocked, the browser will look for the entry of the IP address associated with the site in the hosts file and if it finds the entry, it will give an error message and the site will not open. However, this technique has some limitations like there are many websites which are not known to you as it is not possible to get a list of all such unwanted sites.
Allow the websites instead of blocking them:
This technique is the most accurate one as it uses content advisor in IE. Once you enable it you have the option of allowing or disallowing any site as per your choice. If there are children at your home, you can specify which sites they can visit and block all other sites. To achieve this using internet explorer, open the explorer and go to tools Internet Options content tab and enable the content advisor. Now you can click and allow the appropriate websites while blocking all other sites for that particular user. Here you need to set a password so that the user cannot undo the changes. This way you can set different website access permissions for different users of the computer.
