Modifying hosts file does not have any effect
To expand on the update that was made by the OP:

Chrome stores its own DNS cache for sites that you have visited.  This cuts down on DNS resolution time when browsing sites that you have recently visited.  However, this happens before the hosts file is checked for DNS resolution (so your new hosts entries will not be checked if they are in the Chrome DNS).  Therefore, you need to clear out Chrome's DNS cache.  You can go to chrome://net-internals/#dns and clear it out from there.

The order in which Chrome checks for DNS (from first to last) is:  local-cache->hosts-file->DNS-Server