Here at Pagely, we’ve had customers requesting a staging location for some time, and we finally have an answer. Our VPS hosting plans and above (Enterprise) now feature staging – which is great news.
The current staging we have in place syncs files and databases between sites with the ability to ignore tables and/or files. There is also a capability for basic site renaming, but without database rewriting of URLs since there are cases where that can cause issues.
Our normal recommendation for developers wanting to test plugins/deploys etc is to use our tool to sync production to staging. Then deploy changes using Capistrano or just a manual script and wp-cli, test and then run the same script against production. For non-developers we recommend a similar approach, but following a written script.
We are aware that many are seeking 2-way push-button syncing between production and staging, but syncing from staging to production with WordPress is very dangerous, and we can’t with good conscious build or recommend a system that will blow up and destroy customer sites an estimated 1% of the time.
As time goes on we will be improving our staging aspect, and later this year rolling it out for our standard plans. Keep an eye out for updates as we are constantly working to improve various aspects of our service.
Josh I think this is one of the biggest progressions you made as a business. I’m going to move 12 site off my 100% fire host account in exchange for 100% Firehost WAF protected VPS