Making A Web Site Use A Different IP Address in Windows XP and Vista

here is a quick tech tip for making your web browser use a different server to pull up a web site. Say you updated the DNS for your web site and you want to make sure the new server is setup correctly. Do the following:

Go to: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Edit the hosts file with a text editor, add the following to the end of the file:

IP Addresss You Want Web Site To Use somesite.com

for example it might look like this:

69.16.198.200 itwebexperts.com

you will need one for www.itwebexperts.com too, or the www version of the url, so also put:

69.16.198.200 www.itwebexperts.com

Yep, it's that easy. Save the host file, reload your web browser and that's it.