Your website hosting plan can involve numerous environments that act as stand alone websites. While completely independent in terms of functionality, they are linked in a waterfall format where changes, enhancements, and updates can be quickly migrated from one to another.
In this article, we break down the most common environments.
Production Environment
The “production” site is just a techy way to describe your live site – the one the whole world sees.
What to do with this environment
This is the one you pretty much leave alone. All of your changes and updates should be performed in another environment then deployed to production once they are tested and ready. In other words, this is the final destination for development.
Staging Environment
As the name implies, this environment is used to stage changes and updates prior to deploying to the Production or “live” environment.
What to do with this environment
The staging site is intended to provide testing and Q/A. The most common way to use the staging server is to perform updates and minor changes to your site. The idea is to offer an opportunity to review how these changes would effect your site and fix any issues before releasing those changes for the world to see.
Development Environment
The 3rd environment is less common as it specifically involved in major development. New functionality implemented on a development site is then moved to staging for Q/A prior to deployment.
What to do with this environment
This is where you would perform major development. Typically, a development site is used for projects that will take at least several weeks to complete. This allows you to continue your maintenance schedule using the staging site as your development continues. Otherwise, you would have to pause your maintenance until the new feature is ready to launch.
