Installing a development instance of the CRM with the same IFD settings as prod

I've Installed a development instance of the CRM with the same IFD settings as the production instance. The problem is that when I'm trying to connect to the local development instance, I have to use the same URL that the production instance uses, so the browser leads me to the production CRM instead of the development one. Sometimes I manage to end up on the development instance using the same URL, but a lot of times I can't.

I've set up the internet adapter to not have internet access (only uses the local DC DNS), cleared browser cache, cookies, history, and SSL state, yet the browser still goes to the production instance over the internet.

The main reason why the development instance has the same IFD config as the production one is because I'm planning on promoting the development instance (which is hosted in AWS) to production once I'm done configuring and testing everything. So I don't want to be changing the IFD settings later. Plus, I believe there are other dependencies that I need to test that rely on the URL being the same as the production one.

What are your suggestions on how to resolve this issue?