How to access your website from your Linux machine when the site's domain name has expired but you remember the IP

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The main purpose of a domain-name is to make the website simpler to access. It is easier for users to remember domain names rather than having to remember IP addresses of sites. But do you know that it would be quite useful to remember IPs when the domain name has expired? How would you access a site whose domain name has expired? Most people have no idea about this. This article is here to help.

Consider you have a site 'www.google.com' and its domain name google.com has expired. But you know the server's IP address as 74.125.236.134. If you want to access the site with that, from a Linux machine, use the following method for that:

Add the following line to the file /etc/hosts:

www.google.com 74.125.236.134

Here, www.google.com is the domain name and 74.125.236.134 is its IP address.

Now the site should be accessible via your machine's Web Browser.