The Internet is a very wonderful place for you and your kids to explore. You can do many things through Internet which makes your life much more convenient, such as paying bills, shopping, booking plane and hotel tickets, meeting friends, checking examinations results, querying and the list goes on and on. However you should protect your kids while they are online just as you do while they wander in streets.

You might want to teach your children about the internet predators and the dangers they can cause to them, but only teaching them might not work out sometimes. You need to take all the precautions from your side such as blocking unwanted websites, parental control through windows, browser security, internet filter software and many more. The quality of service depends on how much you are willing to spend and what level of security you want.

One way to ensure security is by activating Parental Control Bar in your Operating System. You can customize settings according to your requirements, such as listing the websites you want to block, setting time limit for usage, blocking programs or games to run in your computer etc. You can simply activate the ‘Child Mode’ from the setting which will activate all the default setting. It is very quick and easy comparing to other software where you need to define all the options in the settings. It also allows you to observe a website and set it as ‘always allow’ or ‘always block’ so that you don’t have to look at the websites every time.

Another method to block websites is by writing commands into your computer which is totally free of charge. In this method you need to edit the Host File, first go to the ‘command prompt’ and type ‘notepad C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts’ and locate ‘127.0.0.1 local host’. Then you need to put the website you want to block after this number, for example you want to block ‘yahoo.com’ then you should enter ‘127.0.0.1 yahoo.com’ in the command prompt. You can do this as many number of time as you want.

There are many filtering and safety software available in the market which can even be used for free in some cases, in which case the features might be limited. Purchasing a right software is very essential step for you and your family to ensure safety. It will provide you with complete monitoring reports and let you decide which program or website is safe for your family. You can filter and block website according to the contents that you define. It also let you to manage multiple users in a same computer providing them different level of security according to your setting.

There are pros and cons in every software, but it is up to your requirement that you decide which one suit you the best. There are many factors that you need to consider before deciding on which software you want. Go for the one most useful for your family.