Setting up a staging environment with an external hosting site?

I've been working for a few years on a project for 开发者_Go百科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 database, 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.

The site I'm using for hosting doesn't offer a staging environment for the site, so I was wondering what I can do to get a staging environment set up. If my site is www.mysite.com, can I use staging.mysite.com, or do I need to purchase another domain?

I'm curious as to how other people handle this...

Not sure this is an SO question but in case it is:

• It would depend on the services offered by your web host, some offer sub-domains, for a price
• You could also deploy to a sub-folder, eg www.mysite.com/staging
• Purchase another (cheaper?) hosting plan, eg www.mystagingsite.com
• If you don't need public access, just deploy to another local machine, either physical or virtual