Journal shahryarghazi's Journal: How to Define Static hostnames for IP Addresses in Windows

Problem: If you want to define a static fully qualified domain name (FQDN) on your windows XP/Server 2003 machine, so that your computer does not contact a DNS server to resolve a particular IP address then you can do so by using the instructions explained here.
Scenario:
This can be useful on a number of situations one such situation is as follows.
Let's say you have a web server hosting www.example.com and you want to add a new machine to this web address for load balancing purposes. Once you are done setting up the new machine you'll test it by using the direct IP address of that machine. You cannot access the new machine using www.example.com because every time you try that your computer will be forwarded to the old machine (whose IP address is stored in the DNS server). In this situation you can use the instructions below to give a static IP address (IP address of the new machine) to www.example.com, so that your computer connects with the new server (when you access it) using www.example.com.
Benefits and Drawbacks:
The lookups are really fast because they use a local file on your computer. You can use this technique to store IP addresses for the most visited domain names. But, I can see two problems with that solution (i) it is not scalable and (ii) the solution is not dynamic.