Hi! It seems there is some instabilities on your instance, for the past few days there has been short periods of time where the server responds with 500 errors or just timeouts, were you aware of this?
It really makes a difference, for the last few days I had to restart my Connect app every five minutes because it lost server connection. It didn't happen since then :)
You can add an entry to your /etc/hosts file for the IP part, but this cannot remove the need to specify the port number as it is unrelated to the domain/IP