Looking at the body of the text, rather than the head/footer, and excluding comments lines, here is what I get with counts:

  [~]$ cat hosts_example.txt | grep -v '#' | awk '{print $1}'| sort | uniq -c
       56 
        1 ::1
     9674 127.0.0.1
        1 255.255.255.255
        1 fe80::1%lo0