Ahhhhh…SUCCESS!!!! I answered my own question…thanks to a hint from this article:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress
…which says:
“If you want to test before you switch, you must temporarily change “siteurl” and “home” in the database table “wp_options” (through phpMyAdmin or similar).”
But in a nutshell…your ROOT url/uri can be defined to be a static IP (or a shared IP with user name, or other, depending on your host’s system settings) INSTEAD of your domain name. You must set it manually by altering your wp-database table as described above.
Keep in mind that utilities such as PhpMyAdmin will default display 30 rows of your table, and that “siteurl” is easy to find at row #1, but your “home” is found in row 39 or so…
