You hear this all the time in software companies - Some business analysts, developer or product manager trying to solve a dilemma in software development by pushing the decision to the end user side. “Let’s make it configurable” seems like a get-out-of-jail free card if you can’t make you mind about colors, screen layout and many other hard choices we have to make many time when designing our software.
The cost of common shared hosting starts at 3$-10$ per month. While this is a cost many can afford, there are many out there that find it hard to spend 120$/year. Well, in the past 4 years I have used the idea of hostMates very successfully, saving money and learning from my mates.
Please note: HostMate is an idea, best practice if you want. It is not a product or a service, although someone might want to provide this service.
The following happens in many software projects -
At start, it seems you only need one environment for your web application, well, at most two:
One development environment (AKA your PC) and one server.
But as time pass, you find you need additional environments:
The clients might want their own testing environment, sometimes you need to have a pre-production environment or a staging environment, so business managers can approve the ongoing content as well as look & feel.
Do you really need these environments? What are these environment good for?
Here is a short description of some of the more popular environments and their purpose.
