Hosts file has double entries, are these nessesary?

[Lifeblood]

Hello,

I have added Spybot's list of bad websites my hosts file.

I noticed that there are many double entries such as

127.0.0.1 www.70-music.com
127.0.0.1 70-music.com

My questions are....

1. What is the reason for these double entries?
2. Are these double entries nessesary?
3. Can I delete all of the entries with "www." and still be protected properly?

It seems to me that all of the entries with "www." in front of them are just unnessesarily adding to the size, of the already too big, hosts file, but I could be wrong.

I'm trying to make my hosts file as small as possible, without sacrificing security, in order to speed up connection times.

Thanks,

Lifeblood

[Lifeblood]

Is anybody going to reply to this?

[spybotsandra]

Hello,

Some sites can be accessed without the www in front of it, some not, and some can be accessed with both. So we are making sure that all of these bad sites are blocked. The host file is not really a big file, that takes too much space on your drive, we are talking about KB here. ;)

Best regards
Sandra
Team Spybot

[Lifeblood]

I know the file is not large when it comes to hard drive disk space.

I was talking about the amount of data inside the hosts text file.

Every time a person wants to connect to a website, thier browser has to check the website that they are trying to connect to against every site with the hosts file, to verify that it is not a bad website.

The longer the hosts file is, the slower the connection to a website will be, therefore the smaller the hosts file is, the quicker the connection will be.

I have noticed a bit of a slow down since adding your hosts file, and was just trying to shrink it if I could without sacrificing my security.