If you are a web developer

If you develop complex, interactive web sites, you probably design them on your local development server, before uploading the web pages and scripts to the production server. For example, if the domain name of your web site is www.mycoolsite.com, then during the development phase you want the host name www.mycoolsite.com to point to your development server (or to your own computer, if you don't have a separate development server). When the development is finished and the site goes live, you want the name www.mycoolsite.com to point to your production server, to make you able to test the live web site and see it just like the rest of the world does. When developing and maintaining a non-trivial web site, you are probably switching back and forth between the development and productions servers may times. If you do that by manually editing the Windows HOSTS files, you have probably wondered many times, there should be a better way of doing it, haven't you?

As a matter of fact, there IS a better (as in faster and more efficient) way of managing your host names, and this is what HostName Commander is all about. With HostName Commander you are be able to switch the server your web site name points to with just a couple of clicks of the mouse, any time of the day or night, and see the result immediately (well, almost immediately). When you need to test the web site on the development server, you would use HostName Commander to make the host name www.mycoolsite.com to resolve to the IP address of your development server (such as 127.0.0.1, if it's your own computer, or something like 192.168.0.5, if the development server is on your LAN). When you no longer want the host name of your site to resolve to the development server, HostName Commander would let the DNS server resolve it to the IP address of the production server.

If you tried to manage the host names manually before, you know that the web browser cache is often causes annoying problems when you switch the host name from one server to another: even when you make the host name to point to a new server, the web browser keeps displaying the pages from the cache that it previously downloaded from the old server. To solve this problem, you would need to manually open the web browser cache and clean or empty it after each change to the host name. With HostName Commander this problem is no longer a problem: it can clean up the browser cache for you automatically after each change from the development to production server (and back), removing from the cache only the pages which belong to the web site affected, and leaving the rest of the browser cache intact.

HostName Commander comes especially handy when you develop a large number of different web sites for different clients. HostName Commander lets you see and control all host names of the web sites you manage using the convenient and straightforward user interface, that lets you manipulate the host names of your web sites quickly and easily.

If you want to block certain web sites

The ability of HostName Commander to point web site names to arbitrary IP addresses makes you able to stop users of your computer from viewing the unwanted web sites, by mapping their host names to the invalid IP addresses.

For example, if your child is working on a term paper about the US government, you don't want him or her to accidentally type into the web browser the address whitehouse.com and end up at an infamous adult web site, instead of the web site devoted to the home of the US President (which correct address is whitehouse.gov).

With HostName Commander, you can assign some invalid IP address (such as 127.0.0.1) to the host names whitehouse.com and www.whitehouse.com, and that will make the web browser to display the Web site not found or a similar error message, when trying to see the contents of the blocked web site.

Even better, you can determine the actual IP address of the whitehouse.gov server, and assign whitehouse.com and www.whitehouse.com to that address, too. This way, no matter which address your child has entered into the browser, both whitehouse.gov and whitehouse.com will take him or her to the US President's home web site.

If you want to block third-party web ads

You can use the ability of HostName Commander to point web site names to arbitrary IP addresses to block the third-party web advertisements from being displayed on the web pages or in the popup windows while you are browsing the Internet.

A third-party ad is an image that is loaded by a web site from a separate server, with a host name different from the host name of the main web server. For instance, many web advertisements come from the adserver.com web site. If you use HostName Commander to point the name adserver.com to some invalid IP address (such as 127.0.0.1), the web browser will not be able to connect to adserver.com, and that in turn will make it unable to download the advertising images from that server. As a result, the blank image placeholders will be displayed on the web pages instead of the actual advertisements. Since the main contents of a web site is loaded from a server with a different host name (such as www.cnn.com or www.news.com), the main content of the web pages will not be affected by the blocking of the adserver.com site.

(Of course, this method of blocking web ads works only if the main content and the ad images on a particular web page are served from different servers. If a particular web page displays ads from the same server as its main content, you cannot block the ads, because if you were to assign an invalid IP address to the server's host name, that would stop the delivering of the main content of the web site, too. If the sites you visit most display ads from their own servers, use the ad-blocking software specifically designed to filter web content and block web ads it contains.)