Staging sites: how do you do them?

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

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

Staging is just a subdomain plus a database copy — nothing fancy, works fine.

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

Would love to hear how you all handle this.

Same registrar here, never had a problem in six years.

Test restores monthly — it has saved me twice now.

Thanks for sharing, saved me a lot of time.

Test restores monthly — it has saved me twice now.

Bumping this because I ran into the same thing today.

Test restores monthly — it has saved me twice now.

Could not agree more.

That has been my experience as well.

Same registrar here, never had a problem in six years.

A simple rsync cron is my entire backup strategy and I sleep fine.

Test restores monthly — it has saved me twice now.

A simple rsync cron is my entire backup strategy and I sleep fine.

certbot with the nginx plugin has been flawless for me.

Test restores monthly — it has saved me twice now.