I am in process of making first Drupal 7 website and for that searching for the web hosting. And I found that, several hosting says 1-click Drupal installation. But as I was searching the net for standard practice of site development, many sources explains Develop the site on local environment and then transfer to the web server (which includes, transfer of database, and whole drupal with modules) which is quite convincing that you develop locally and transfer to web so it start working there as it was working on locally.
On the other hand, what is the use of 1 click drupal installation on web server, I believe it will install the fresh core drupal, so from again initially I have to start developing, installing each module so, starting from square 1.
So, which is the BEST practice for making web site live, shall i develop locally first or develop directly on web server?
Simultaneously, what is the best practice about maintaining site, I read that, there should be One live site where visitor will come, Second Test site which is similar to live, One local site, So what is the standard practice for this, and how to maintain?
Very thanks in advance.
In my previous answer in point 2 i outline 4 servers: DEV, STAGE, QA and PROD. this is usually the process on kind of "biggish" company where lots of people might be working in infrastructure, development and qa department. This said, if you are not working in a complex environment, you might just have 2 drupal installations, one for testing , on DEV (e.g dev.mysite.com) and one live (eg.mysite.com). The different url can be arranged from you cpanel or personal panel in case of a shared server.
They might run on the same server, however the dev site is the one you will be working on while creating the site, then you will clone the dev and make it live once the site is ready.
You will keep the dev site as a space to test new features, fix bugs, test updates of module or core files. Once these new features are implemented, or bug fixed, you will replicate the same steps on the live site.
GIT is a version control system: it allow you to keep track of the code you are working on, you might want to create 2 branches: DEV and MASTER.
You will be working on DEV to create the site or update files or fix bugs, and you will merge to LIVE and pull on the live server the code once it's stable. I hope this clarify a bit.