Staging Environment Hosting

A second copy of your application, on its own address behind a password, so a change can be tried somewhere that is not production. If you have inherited an application and nobody has ever tested a change before it went live, this is the cheapest thing on this list that fixes that. We refresh it from production data when you ask, so what you test against resembles what your customers are using.

What you get

• One staging environment on its own hostname, behind HTTP authentication and kept out of search engines
• The same runtime and configuration as production, so a difference in behavior is a real difference and not an artifact of the environment
• A refresh from production data on request, running the application version production is running
• Credentials for your own people and for anyone you hire to work on the application

What this does not cover

• Production hosting. This is a test environment: it is not monitored, not backed up, and not covered outside business hours. Somewhere for production to live is managed infrastructure.
• Anonymizing the data we copy in. A refresh brings real customer records into the staging copy; if that is a problem where you operate, say so before the first refresh and we will scope the scrubbing instead of assuming it.
• Changes to the application. This is somewhere to run them, not someone to make them.

Who it fits

Anyone about to change an application they did not write and would rather not learn on live traffic. It is a place, not a person — if you also need someone to make the changes, pair it with the Application Maintenance Retainer.