What Does Hosts File Mean?
The hosts file (“hosts.txt”) is a plain-text file that contains a list of host names and their corresponding IP addresses. It is essentially a database of domain names that is used by the operating system for identifying and locating a host in an IP network.
Techopedia Explains Hosts File
The forerunner of the Internet, the ARPANEt, did not have a distributed domain name database since the number of hosts then was very few. But as the popularity of the Internet increased, the idea of the hosts.txt file emerged because of the need to gather in a convenient place all the information about the different hosts in a network.
