Web developers - Is it better to do development on your local machine or on a remote host?

Question

What are the pro/cons of doing web development on your local machine rather than on a centralized development server? For those that do dev on your local machine, how do you kee

Answer 1

I'm a one-man shop; I have both a remote server and a local server.

I use the local server for quick prototyping and the initial development cycle where I'm making lots of changes and need to test them quickly. When it gets to a roughly-alpha stage, I'll set up a custom sub-host for the project and deploy to my server. There are certain features that simply can't be tested locally--i.e. e-mail-based user registration--and so these features get developed on the remote server. Since it's MINE, and not a real deployment, it's still mostly lag-free. Since I have a VPS, I have full control of the development environment on both machines.