Why use hosts file?

Posted by dK3 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by dK3
Published on 2014-08-19T09:42:53Z Indexed on 2014/08/19 10:22 UTC
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hosts

My company has a staging site and we access it by a url like this: www.example.com

Until today I did not realise that I had a line in my hosts file which said:

192.0.2.0 www.example.com

(the ip is fake here)

now when I try to access this site through ip , I cannot get access.. why is this the case?

We even own the domain we are using so I do not see the reason why we are using a hosts file and more over, why I cannot access the site through simple IP (by the way, we are using an internal IP)

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