Once this website is used in production, I'll still have a need of needing to test certain things on an actual server (setup, AimDeploy, general production tests, etc.) and using the one used for the live version of the website won't be a good idea.
One major reason is that anytime we need to make changes to the database, we have to modify the production version since that's the only one we have running, modifying this database will also cause the production version of the website to show bad behaviour, since it was built for a different version of the database.
A staging environment would let me do all of these things without messing with the live environment.
This is completely down to Andy though, since he'd have to be the one to fund the staging server. The digital ocean droplet type we need (at minimum) is $18/month (around £14).
I guess one alternative is to simply mess with it when most of the staff are done for the day, and just take it down for 'maintanence', but I still have a need of needing to mess with the database during development, which may not be done in time for the next day.
Once this website is used in production, I'll still have a need of needing to test certain things on an actual server (setup, AimDeploy, general production tests, etc.) and using the one used for the live version of the website won't be a good idea.
One major reason is that anytime we need to make changes to the database, we have to modify the production version since that's the only one we have running, modifying this database will also cause the production version of the website to show bad behaviour, since it was built for a different version of the database.
A staging environment would let me do all of these things without messing with the live environment.
This is completely down to Andy though, since he'd have to be the one to fund the staging server. The digital ocean droplet type we need (at minimum) is $18/month (around £14).
I guess one alternative is to simply mess with it when most of the staff are done for the day, and just take it down for 'maintanence', but I still have a need of needing to mess with the database during development, which may not be done in time for the next day.
This also brings me to issue #16