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)