I've recently had to re-do this. This has happened too often for me, and it's just very annoying in general. There are many problems (and offered solutions) around /etc/hosts file, for chrome only as well as for the os x generally. I've noticed that the /etc/hosts file works just fine for curl, but does not work for chrome. This led me to believe that the problem was a chrome setting, but upon fixing it, I am less certain that Chrome is the culprit. My solution is below. Basically, the host file needs to be ASCII-compliant. I've had that file soft-linked and modified by a number of actors. Deleting the file, and writing it freshly in vim, worked for me.

**the solution**

delete the /etc/hosts file and write is from scratch, making sure that all characters are latin ASCII.

**the solution**