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That's the whole point to locally test whether the website is working as expected, before changing the global DNS variables.
/etc/hosts is only used to resolve host names locally on your machine before it contacts your DNS server so editing your /etc/hosts file doesn't really help test anything in the context of seeing if your public DNS records are updated.
That's why you can add something like 127.0.1.1 google.com to your /etc/hosts and now google.com resolves to a loopback address instead of the real google.com page (for your machine only). It's because your configured DNS servers haven't even been contacted yet to resolve that hostname.
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/etc/hosts is only used to resolve host names locally on your machine before it contacts your DNS server so editing your /etc/hosts file doesn't really help test anything in the context of seeing if your public DNS records are updated.
That's why you can add something like
127.0.1.1 google.comto your /etc/hosts and now google.com resolves to a loopback address instead of the real google.com page (for your machine only). It's because your configured DNS servers haven't even been contacted yet to resolve that hostname.