I'm putting the site I've been developing locally online today. I'm developing locally on Linux and hosting online with Linux. The site is a video hosting site with social networking and I just wanted to clear a few things up before I upload it.
1) Should I create a test site online aswell as my live site?
2) What is the procedure for transferring local development work online? Do I just copy the copy the entire drupal directory to my online web hosting? And then in future when I make any changes/updates just copy the drupal/sites folder from my local site to my online site, overwriting the existing drupal/sites folder in the process? What about the database, I obviously can't be uploading the local drupal database in its entirety every time I make changes to the site or I would lose all my user and content data from the live database?
3) I'm using Linux Mint on my laptop but my hosting is on Red Hat Linux, will this be an issue in anyway?
