Build locally or live?

EsR

EsR

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Would you recommend building a site locally through something like XAMPP or do you build sites live? I feel like building locally can give you time to work out a design/layout (and save some time setting up hosting), but if you build on a live site it will push you to get it out in the world faster. Advice/thoughts?
 
I feel like for you it would be better to purchase hosting and do it live because then you've made a commitment and you'll be more likely to follow through.

Just my opinion based on your past thread.

But I don't see what the difference is unless you buy an expired domain with existing traffic.
 
I used to build locally. Now I just build on the server and block all crawling and visits except my own IP until I'm ready to unveil it. Keeps me from having to dive into the database during the transfer.
 
If it's a WordPress site, unless you are making a theme or something, it's normally best to just edit it all online. You can have a separate WordPress install(s) that you keep locally to test out different themes and maybe work out the look/feel where everything is local and fast, but you're really not going to want to build the whole site like that, only to have to repeat the whole process.

What I do a lot of the time is set up the WordPress install on the server then I'll block all IPs but mine in the vhost config file or .htaccess (not a big fan of this method but it works). Also, by building it online, you're gaining valuable experience as you work with the WordPress back-end, and in some cases, the back-end of the server itself in the live environment.

For static/dynamic sites that aren't built off of a CMS like WordPress, I'll develop locally and make a git repo for every site. As I add content, I commit to the git repo. That way deploying a site is as easy as logging in to the server and doing a "git pull". Git will figure out what's changed and act accordingly. A normal deploy takes me less time than it takes most people to open their FTP/SFTP/SCP program and connect to the their site and I'm getting a backup of my files complete with revision control by using git.
 
What are you using for a programming environment?

I used to build live but forget that now.. I've decreased my development time by 5% after taking the time to configure a push/pull setup which opens the door to developing from different computers (push changes from local to server or pull changes from server to local). You really capture time savings when you push all your changes in one batch versus pushing changes on each small modification. Pushing changes is instant when developing local, pushing changes to the server takes 2-3 seconds (amongst other things) if developing live. Multiply that by multiple revisions, over long periods of time, and you've got a bunch of time wasted.

This may or may not be the case for you but it was for me. 5% on 48 hours of development = 2.4 hours.

Just some food for thought.
 
All good responses, and kind of goes along how I was thinking (wanted to keep it open ended to get a discussion going). I work off of WordPress sites, so it's definitely not hard to build live. I don't build themes from scratch, so it's not like I'll need to be in a quarantined environment to test features.

built said:
I feel like for you it would be better to purchase hosting and do it live because then you've made a commitment and you'll be more likely to follow through.
Click to expand...

So true... it'll definitely add that fire to keep working since i'll be spending money (don't want to spend money just to spend it).

Thanks for all your responses
 
I build everything locally and then deploy through git. I have a staging server setup for testing and use push to deploy and a bunch of other automation for testing and moving to production. With SaaS - I don't want any downtime.

For general CMS stuff, I generally also work locally and have the same process, except I do not have a staging server in most cases.
 
If the site is not live yet, either build locally and push, or build on the actual server after blocking access to visitors as mentioned earlier in this thread.

If you are making changes to a live site, and the site only has a handful of visitors, it doesn't matter much either way.

If you want to update a site which has millions (or even thousands) of revenue generating visitors daily, you don't want to make changes live, unless it is something trivial. Build using a similar server (local or another machine) and push your changes after you've tested everything.
(This is why large companies have development, testing, performance, and production environments.)
 
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