One question for you – do you plan to use the development server to show your clients the work in progress? If so, then it’s a whole lot of extra work (involving DynDNS or another mapping system) to host sites on your Mac that can be seen by the outside world. By design, your Mac is not currently sharing your data with the outside world, and you have to (carefully) poke holes in that.
I have a setup here at my home office that takes a fair amount of hardware and experience to configure. I have an Xserve, which has two network interfaces. One is connected to my internal network, and the other is connected to my Cisco router, which defines a very short list of ports that are open to traffic from the outside world. The whole thing is connected to the Internet with a T1 line and static IP addresses. When I want to configure a site to show a client, I can add that to the Xserve through the internal network, and configure a CNAME record at my Domain Name Server provider EasyDNS. Then the client can see that new site at “their” address, usually [acronym].walterdavisstudio.com.
If you only have the one Mac, and you’re using MAMP, then you have two strikes against you already: 1) MAMP has to be running in order for the server to be available, and your Mac has to be running and awake. 2) Most ISPs give you a dynamic IP address, which means that you can’t just go to a service like EasyDNS and configure a real DNS record for your Mac – you have to use a special intermediary like DynDNS, which runs another application on your Mac that pings back to the host server every time the IP address changes on your Mac and updates the dynamic DNS record (hence the name).
I don’t recommend that anyone set up their own dev server such as I have done unless they are fascinated with the technology and willing to commit to maintaining it. The internet is already chock-a-block with infected servers, there’s no need to add more targets for the bot-overlords to conquer.
If you need a good dev server, Modwest is a great choice. ~$8/month, automatic dynamic subdomains (just make a folder in your server’s root, and you’re done – instant [foldername].yourdomain.com subdomain host, no configuration needed), and fairly modern versions of MySQL, Apache, and PHP. And someone else takes care of it for you, so you can sleep at night. Your time is worth so much more than $8, it’s not even worth thinking about the alternatives. The issues you have had with GoDaddy are unique to GoDaddy, and you are well informed to be looking elsewhere to replace them anyway.
Walter
On Jul 1, 2012, at 10:58 AM, RavenManiac wrote:
After advice from several forum members, I’ve decided to change my website development workflow. My old setup involved setting up client subdirectories on my own company server hosted by godaddy. Now that I’m starting to integrate CMS into my websites I’m finding that my old workflow was problematic in that a lot of links got broken when I moved the website from my development environment to the client’s server.
Can somebody walk me through how I setup MAMP Pro with my Mac as a development server for various client websites?
Thanks!
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