Setting up a staging environment

I've been working for a few years on a project for a friend of mine, and it has slowly grown into a large website.

In the early stages, I just did development on my local machine with a local d开发者_StackOverflow社区atabase, then deployed any site and database changes to the live site.

This worked well for a while, but lately we've been having issues with deployment. We'd like to set up a staging environment for testing before we deploy to the production environment.

I'm using DiscountASP.Net for hosting, does anyone know if they offer a service for a staging environment? Or is there another way I should go about setting it up?

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A staging environment it basically a another space (usually a server, but if you're using shared hosting then another account) that is identical to your production space, so you can test as if you're on the real server without breaking your live site.

Anything can be a staging environment, but there's no point in testing unless it's an identical space.