Chapter 5: Development and Hosting Environments
If you're making the move from being a freelancer or working in an agency or large organization, one of the most unfamiliar aspects of running a web design business can be setting up hosting and development environments. Regardless of whether this was always taken care of in the past by someone else or you were the person who took care of it, this is an area in which you'll need to make some decisions—namely, the following:
• What development environment will you work with? The solution you choose will depend on your experience and preferences, but it will also depend on the needs of the client, each project, and the rest of your team.
• Will you offer or set up hosting for your clients? You could provide reseller hosting, or you could just set up sites on your clients' hosting for them—or you could do neither and hand sites over to clients for them to upload to their hosting environment. The latter option is unlikely for most projects, unless all of your clients have their own web team that can handle this process.
This chapter covers development and hosting environments in detail. By the end of it you'll have learned the following:
• How to identify the most appropriate development environment for each project
• How to set up your development environment, whether locally or remotely
• How to prepare for launch of a site and migrate a WordPress site
• How to decide what hosting to offer and identify the best hosting provider ...
