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Originally Posted by Paul M
What do you mean by a "DNS timeout" ?
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Whenever you type a url in your browser, for example
www.google.com this has to be looked up on a dns server (basically it's like a big address book). The dns server tells you the ip of the url (for google it's 216.239.51.99). Without knowing the ip you (or your pc) wouldn't know whereabouts in the world the site was hosted on and so wouldn't be able to find it. DNS timeouts are where the dns server doesn't (for whatever reason) tell you the ip, so you can't go to the site.
Erm, I think this explanation is right, someone correct me if it's not.
I *think* that if you have the ip's of sites in your hosts file then you don't need a dns server, but obviously without using the dns server you can only visit the sites who's ip's you've already put into the hosts file.