As most of you know, the HOSTS file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) can be loaded with lists of dodgy domains that tells Windows to avoid.
What's your opinion about using the HOSTS file this way? Some lists have over 40,000 entries.
If you do use these lists, whose is the best?
The hosts file dates back to the earliest days of the Internet when it was arpanet. It's purpose is to associate names with IP addresses, what DNS now does. A large hosts file has been known to cause performance problems. Many have found it necessary to disable the DNS client in services. This means all DNS requests will have to go to a DNS server rather than being resolved from the local cache.
I have not used a hosts file for this purpose. All I know is from Internet searches.
I've been customizing my hosts file for around 15 years. For almost 10 years now I've used the one from mvps.org. To that I've added a few more entries, principally URLs that seem to be solely devoted to Microsoft telemetry. As LMiller7 mentioned, to improve performance I've also set "DNS Client" to "Manual" in services.msc.
Below are screenshots of the same page rendered on a machine with the default hosts file (left) and a machine with my custom hosts file (right). It's obvious to see a couple of ads that were blocked, and there were more further down the page. The page on the right loaded about 10 times faster than the one on the left. I would not run without a custom hosts file on my main machine.
I was using my hosts file to block stuff for probably close to 20 years, But for the last year or so I have switched to running my own DNS server's (2) on my local lan using a neat project called PiHole.
One DNS server is is running on a virtual machine and the other is running on an old crappy laptop.
Links to Pihole:
GitHub - pi-hole/pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
Pi-hole Userspace
A subreddit dedicated to Pi-hole®
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