Hello there! You may find at times that we have a client site that has a lot of activity or load associated with it (aka lots of visitors or a high volume of sales!) and any downtime or visible changes to the site are not acceptable since the user base would see these changes to the site before they are approved, or functionality could be affected by the changes.
Other reasons for the development site could be when there are a lot of changes to be made and you will be leaving the site incomplete overnight or longer, or you are waiting for review from the client, or you have to experiment with solutions and do some testing.
We have some clients with these requirements and so the best policy is for us to create a staging site or a development site and have a copy of the live site transferred to this staging/dev environment. We usually reach out to Hosting Nation by sending an Asana task their way and ask them to create a dev site which would be located at yourclientsdomainhere.gotbdev.com and in some cases they will create a staging site located at staging.yourclientsdomainnamehere.com.
The difference between a staging and development site is, a staging site is located on the clients server and is a quicker change for Hosting Nation to move from a staging site to the live site and a development environment is hosted on the Geeks hosting plan and not accessible to the client except by the url that we share with the them for review. A staging site does depend on the available space on the clients server, if there is not enough room for essentially two copies of the site then a development site is needed.
It is also important to add that when we are developing a site for a client from scratch we use the gotbdev.com environment so that we have complete control of this environment and can ask Hosting Nation for assistance easily.
Key Considerations
Since the live site may have constantly updated information such as blog posts etc. it is important to ask the client and their team to not make any further changes to the live site until the development site has been reviewed and approved. If they continue making changes to the site then the development site is going to over ride these changes and any new content the client adds will be lost, as in the case of new blog posts. Make sure to let the client know when they can resume activity on the live site after transfer.
Also, always ask Hosting Nation to make a backup of the live site prior to creating the stage or dev site and then back up again after the transfer.
So that’s it in a nutshell!