I could work on it locally, but then not sure how to migrate it to the live server without having downtime?
About havign a second installation, the issue is that the hosting provider (which I am pretty much locked into because I am developing the website from someone else who paid for that hosting) only gives access to the document root and not its parent directory. So I cannot really install anything outside the document root (usually called htdocs or public_html) folder.
