For those in the website business, it can be abit un-nerving if you have to migrate websites only to realize you cannot test them unless they re-point them to the new A-Server records and using http://<ip-address> is just pointless.
The reason this is possible is because when using shared hosting, the hostname parameter is used to identify which website should be accessed and your server knows how to route and server websites based on “hostname” and not IP address alone.
Three options will work;
From the browser;
http://<website-ip-address>/~cpanel username
e.g for kujahapa i would use; http://50.87.32.46/~kusername where kusername is the kujahapa cpanel username, for example purposes i use a dummy username so kusername will not route anywhere
Over CLI on a *nix we have another options
$ wget –header ‘Host:kujahapa.com’ http://50.87.32.46
$ curl –header ‘kujahapa.com’ http://50.87.32.46
Hope this helps.