Nexcess Cloud clients using Magento 1, Magento 2, WordPress, or WooCommerce can easily create development (dev) sites through the Client Portal. These dev sites incur a small monthly charge; please see our website for pricing details.
Ready within minutes, these sites can serve as exact copies of your production website.They are ideal for operations that are too risky or impractical to perform in your live environment. These include, but are not limited to:
Testing new versions of software
Benchmarking performance, especially since your dev site mirrors the data size of your production site
Creating a “sandbox” for your developers, where they can freely experiment with new features and configurations
Key differences between your dev and production sites
In most cases, your dev site functions as an exact copy of your production site. Nexcess Cloud dev sites do not Auto Scale, but they otherwise function like any other Nexcess Cloud account.
ATTENTION: To protect encrypted data, dev-site creation changes any encryption keys present in your production site, though it does not re-encrypt them.
The dev site will use the same software and software versions as your production site (Magento, WordPress, PHP, MySQL, and so on).
When you create the dev site, you may choose to Copy Site Data and Anonymize Database. By default, both are set to ON.
Copy Site Data transfers all data from your production site, though it changes references to external services to point to the newly deployed dev account. Things like MySQL users and passwords are updated along with references to Redis and other per-account services.
Anonymize Database deletes all personal identifiable information (PII) and replaces it with placeholder information. PII includes:
Email addresses
Names
Addresses
Phone numbers
Credit card details: CVV, cardholder name, expiration date
Content in comments and posts (WordPress)
How to create dev sites from the Client Portal
See How to create dev sites in Nexcess Cloud.
For 24-hour assistance any day of the year, contact our support team by email or through your Client Portal.
