Add the name/IP to your local hosts file. It all works great then. Until the server changes IPs, anyways.

I did this with a website I liked which had let the domain expire. It worked for quite some time, until the VPS/whatever expired too. Good thing the Internet Archive is a thing.

The internet gets along quite fine without DNS. Packets route from network to network. DNS is an application-layer protocol. People often confuse the web with the internet. We use phone numbers for phone calls. It's conceivable with IPv6 you could nail up your IP address and use a QR code to make the addresses accessible. In a hundred years will DNS still be necessary? I don't think so.