Staging sites: how do you do them? — follow-up

Moving from shared hosting to a VPS was the best decision for my sites.

Learned the hard way that an untested backup is a Schrödinger backup.

My monitoring setup alerts me within a minute of downtime and costs nothing.

I put every site behind the same free CDN tier and forgot about DDoS worries.

Curious what everyone else here thinks about it.