I have a website on the server, containing .htaccess. For testing purposes I wanted to replace it with another .htaccess, but changes have been ignored. Even though I have replaced with new .htaccess or even deleted it from server root, website is still working, like I haven't done any changes.

Basically new .htaccess is being ignored, it's like server cached it and doesn't care about the new one. Because of that a testing site won't work since old rewrite rules are still in place. All I know about server is that it's Linux.

Is there any way to make server see the changes? I cannot restart server.