Brett/Gary
On the 'old' VPS we have a working 'fake' domain which IS accessible using the same mechanism -- 209.217.xxx.xxx/~moodle25/training/
and this successfully loads the 'old' pre-production site home page (when that server isn't crashing ) The tilde ( ~ ) in the URL is Centos/cPanel/Apache way of allowing 'fake' domains to exist and be successfully resolved. I've made sure that the setting permitting this is identical on both the old & new VPS'es.
I do use a hosts file on both Mac/Win to block/allow various IP's, but none of the machines near me, nor those of others in the company, have any issues successfully resolving the 'old' v1.9 production site -or the v2.5.4 pre-production site. None of these machine have entries in the hosts file to 'deal' with our 'fake' domain . Thus irrespective of the o/s or browser, there's nothing special we have to do to access the 'fake' site.
As to whether root is the correct user for moodle public_html files, all I can do is refer to http://docs.modle.org/25/en/Installing_Moodle and the section "Download and copy files into place", subsection "Secure the Moodle files", where it says: chown -R root /path/to/moodle
Again, I'm no Linux or Moodle wizard, but doesn't that documentation say root is the correct owner? Or am I misunderstanding something (which may very well be the case).
by Ed Snowdon (no, not THAT one).