Three Stage Development Environment

From Campus Web Server Help

UGA Webhosting offers a novel and robust feature that will not be found among commercial hosting peers, a three-stage development environment. Customers get three environments where you typically only get one! Literally, we have three distinct sets of servers to allow you to test your code, styles, and third-party plugins before allowing the public to view it.

Sites owners with little traffic may see this as over-kill. And they may not use the development nor staging environments at all. But, developers with lots of visitors should definitely take advantage of it.

Consider a robots.txt file to prevent search engines from crawling and caching development and staging content. But, don't forget to remove exclusions when you move files to production.

Development

The content in your /usr/www/dev/$username folder is a playground, where stability takes a back seat to frivolity and testing. Here, developers test plugins, try new style sheets, and the latest fads.

Staging

The stuff you put in /usr/www/stage/$username should mirror production most of the time, except when you are about to release changes into production. Use the staging environment to demo the new site to management or beta testers. It's also a great place for training users to use your new application.

Production

Of course, the prod area is for content that the public will see. Preferably you only put code and content that is ready for prime-time in this area.