Live Or Local Development Environment ?

Hi WordPress Forums Community!

I’v been reading a lot concerning the pros and cons of developing on a live environment or on a local environment (with a distributed revision control system).

I just hired a developer for working on an application and I try to find the best development environment to work together.

Developing on a local machine can always be risk free in a sense that if there are some problems or issues during development the original web site won’t be affected by it.

There’s some drawbacks of working on a local machine:

1. We always have to give some extra efforts to maintain the versioning of the software.

2. We have to spend extra time too in shifting the code from local to live environment.

4. It could be difficult to synch my environment and the developer environment with the same application running on it.

What about working with a live environment for starting a new web application ?

This is where I would appreciate to have the opinion of the WordPress Forums Community ??

The plugin UpdraftPlus simplifies backups (and restoration) for WordPress (and it’s free, just need to open a free Amazon S3 account for cloud storage service).

Why not creating a sub-domain (free with most of web hosting) and transferring the progress of my developer from the main domain to the sub-domain by using the plugin UpdraftPlus?

This way I would be able to work on the website application without risking to messed up with the main domain.

Is it a good idea? Does the plugin UpdraftPlus can affect anything or not?

Thank you very much for your time.