Ray Marron - Hostess (original) (raw)
Hostess is a free utility for maintaining your HOSTS file. I originally wrote Hostess back in the dialup days to help block ads and save precious bandwidth. Hostess stores your host entries in a database that is indexed to eliminate duplicates and make searching fast and easy. It also allows you to group these hosts for efficiency and ease of maintenance.
Installing the program is also easy: just create a directory, extract the contents of the zip file into it and create a shortcut to Hostess.exe. No registry changes are made, and all program settings and data are stored in the program directory.
Messing with the HOSTS file is not for the inexperienced user. There is the possibility of undesirable and sometimes difficult to troubleshoot effects on your Internet and network connectivity. The documentation included with Hostess gives only a basic overview of how the HOSTS file works. Better sources of such information can be found by doing a web search for "HOSTS file". Hostess has been designed to make things easy for the experienced HOSTS jockey, someone that wants a fine degree of control over what goes into (and stays out of) their HOSTS file.
Recent Revisions
Sunday, March 23, 2008 - Hostess 4.1
Hostess now supports imports and exports in plain text format! The command line options were reworked to allow for the new features, and the menu shortcuts were updated so they don't conflict with common text editing shortcuts like Ctrl-V for Paste.
Download
If you are upgrading from a previous version of Hostess (beta or 3.x) be sure to read the special upgrade instructions in the help or readme.txt!
Hostess 4.100, 2008-03-23 - 895K
Unzip using folder names; the html help lives in a subdirectory.
My homemade images foreDexter. Very small, yet they scale well - 7K
If you like Hostess, you may find some of my other free utilities of use. They're over on my Freeware page. If you're not interested in the source code, just unzip the program's EXE file.
Help
This is the same help that comes with the program. Once inside, click the logo at the top left to return here.
Contact Information
To contact me with questions, comments or suggestions about Hostess, send me email at hostess at raymarron dot com.
If at all possible, please use the email link on Hostess' About box. This will include the full program version in the subject of the message.
Awards
License
The works on this page by Ray Marronare licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.