Test Sites?

[eyenest]

I was wondering how everyone had their test sites set up prior to publishing.

in other words do you simple have your site working in one file and then once tested do you copy it to another site?

[felgall]

I test all my scripts on my own computers before I upload them to my site. Because I also offer some of the scripts for sale for others to use and they may not be running the same configuration on their server as BlueHost I have one computer set up with Apache 1.3, PHP 4.3, and mySQL 3.2 and the other with Apache 2.2, PHP 5.2, and mySQL 5.0. If my script works on both those setups then it should work on just about any setup that people are still using.

For when I need to show people something that I have it testing without letting just anyone have access I use a testarea folder on my hosting that is password protected.

[Believer]

I recently setup a CentOS server on an old machine I had laying around. So I actually have a better environment to test on then BH provides, mainly because there are no restrictions, but prior to that, I used xampp (and still do from time to time).