Development Site Basics

I need to know the best practices for running a development environment. I have a domain to work under and have a hosting reseller account as well. But, I don’t know what the best way to go about this is. Local isn’t an option (that I know of) as two of us will be working on the same sites. Here’s what I’d like to accomplish.

• I want to create a site accessible to the Internet on a remote server through my reseller account.
• I do not want the site indexed by search engines during development.
• If I could configure all of this in DNS and WP settings to use something like dev.mydomain.com/clientname that would be great, but I tried before and failed and my domain registrar wasn’t helpful.
• When finished I want to move the site to a new domain. For this I think there are many tutorials.

Being that I have a reseller account I can break up into different ‘servers’, I think I’d be best creating new accounts each time so the files wouldn’t move and I’d only have to change the settings for the domain. Is that correct? Or am I better off working under my domain’s live ‘server’ in a different folder? In this case I’d have to later copy the site including the database and then remove the tables and files later, correct?

So, what’s my best bet here and how do I make it happen. I’m not a total novice to DNS, WordPress, etc, but I’m also not as far along as I need to be.

Thanks
Dan J.