What is a host file?

The computer file hosts can be defined as an operating system file that directs hostnames to IP addresses. The host file is a plain text file. The host file has several system facilities, being one of them to assist in addressing network nodes in a computer network. An operating system’s Internet Protocol (IP) implementation has a host file as its common part. It also serves the function of converting human-friendly hostnames into some numeric protocol addresses, called IP addresses, which identifies and locates a host in an IP network.