Manually connecting to a site

[pc0019]

I have just paid for a years hosting on www.lod-clan.co.uk, and started at university. For some really odd reason, the site can't be accessed (dns error/can't be resolved or something along the lines of that) on some days, but others it works fine. Other people at the university are having this problem, but no one else is.

This is completely over my head, but is it possible to somehow manually connect the the site? I know the IP address, which hosts our site and many others. I'm guessing when I try to go on the site, my computer contacts the DNS server for my webhost, and resolves the domain name to the ip address and something else (if that's completely wrong please tell me!). And I'm thinking that I can't connect to the site on certain days because I can't connect to the DNS server/s for my webhost. Is it possible to store the info retrieved?

I can't use a web proxy due to lack of security.

Thanks very much anyone who can help - this is very frustrating!

[charleyramm]

Hi,

I do something like that by modifying my hosts file.

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

so that it contains an extra line, like this:

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host

127.0.0.1       localhost
66.25.191.219   www.yourwebsite.com