I guess it depends if the staging server needs be accessible by anyone but you. If other people need to be able to access it then you would need another small slice somewhere and then you can use htaccess, or firewall rules to limit who gets access to it. If no one else needs to access it I would suggest using VMWare. You can run it on your own machine, or a spare box you have around, or a very cheap PC. We use the free VMWare Server 2 for our staging and deployment test servers and it works great. It also makes it very easy to create new test servers by just duplicating your base VM setup. If you are on a Mac you can use VMWare Fusion, costs money, but I have to use it already to test IE.
