I would strongly advise against the hosts file solution, for two reasons:

1. Many companies use organizations like Akamai that dynamically return a specific host IP address depending on a range of factors including the geographic location of the browser connecting to it, how busy a server is, etc.

2. The IP address of the server could very easily change from time to time for other reasons, most likely right after you've forgotten you statically created this entry in the hosts file

The opendns solution is the best one by far. It's amazing how many times I've seen people caught out by the hosts file when they are certain the problem is further into the network.