Local development and version control makes maintaining your website cheaper.

After your website is built, maintenance and upgrades are almost always required to maintain growth, streamline usability, add new features, or update static information. There are two main workflow methods that developers can use to make updates to your website. One method uses your remote (live) server as a laboratory and require the site to be taken down for maintenance or temporarily destroyed by live development. The other method makes changes to a separate set of local files on the developer's computer and ports those updates over when they have been properly tested. The updates are released in versions, that way changes can be reverted if there are problems. Developing locally alongside a version-controlled workflow is not only safer, more efficient, and more secure, but it is faster.

Why do developers still use remote connections to develop?

Most experienced back-end developers use a localhost to develop complicated software. Front-end developers traditionally used a remote connection to upload simple graphics and changes to cascading style sheets to the live website or a testing server. The reason stems from the fact that Macintosh and especially Windows operating systems do not make setting up a local development environment as easy as using an FTP program to remotely connect to a server. Version control software is often bulky and the lightweight options like "git" have no solid graphical user interface. Many developers just don't see the value in setting up their workflow in a structured way and opt for the simpler method. The trouble is that the simpler method is slower and is less reliable and will cost the client money undoubtedly.

Request for your website to be version controlled.

Version control software allows developers to sync their local files to your website, this way they have a copy of your website on their computer. Having a local copy is advantageous because developers can make changes to a local version of your website rather than altering or destroying a live website or having to shut the website down for maintenance. Developers make changes to live websites more often then their clients would like, risking total destruction in some cases.

If something happens to your website, a version controlled code-base can be reverted back to a working point in time. Developing locally is also much faster and you will get more bang for your hourly buck. Save yourself a headache and request that your developer uses version control and develops locally.

Campaign Seeds and Git

Developers at Campaign Seeds use Git repositories for all of our new clients. Git is the version-control software used at Drupal.org to manage and fork all of their modules and core development.