Develop on Localhost VS Hosting Provider

Question

I tried to work with Magento on Localhost, but is extremely slow. I tried everything i found on forums in order to make it faster but nothing really changed. My PC is i7, 8GB RAM, HHD on windows.

After i couldnt make it faster on localhost, i tried to setup Magento on a hosting provider server and the results were very very better. But it was a promotion package, i paid for the hosting about 10$ for the first month, but after the first month hosting price went 30$ per month so i don't think its so clever to pay 30$ per month in order to develop a website, because now i just need to develop the website, i don't need visitors, bandwidth etc. I will need about 4-5 months for development.

I am thinking to buying an SSD and setup Magento on localhost again. But iam confused because i cant be sure if SSD make it work faster.

So i have 2 options and i ask for your opinions:

1. Give 40$ for an SSD and work on localhost
2. Buy a cheap hosting server on about 10$ per month. After development i will swich to a good hosting.

What do you think?

Answer 1

Development on local server will always be slow simply because your local server is running server as an additional service on top of all the client applications it is running which use alot of resources hence local server can only use so much of resources.

Hosting servers on the other end are specifically built for hosting only and all resources are dedicated towards that so sites perform better on their servers.

There are things that you can do to speed up your local development but it all depends on factors like how much of development you're going to do and is it work investing time and effort to setup your local server properly, you're ready to adopt the changes that come with setting these advanced type of local dev environments.

In terms of your options:

• you can setup a virtual box and install a Linux distro such as Ubuntu. You'll dedicate memory, cpus and storage to it accordingly. Further reading http://bit.ly/2jdy5eX
• Second option is to setup Vagrant dev environment which requires bit of learning in order to set it up and configure it properly but these are better performing environments http://bit.ly/2j04bwL
• If on windows 10 then you can consider using windows native containers and hyper-v virtualization option which in some ways works similar to vagrant box

Personally, I've tried all of them and settled on using Ubuntu on virtual box but it's personal preference in most cases. Good luck.

Answer 2

Buy SSD and develop on your local machine. Invest in your infrastructure, not somebody elses.

• SSD is a must. Magento does many reads and with a slow HDD it will affect performance.
• Save session and cache in Redis to lower disk I/O.
• Install rg (ripgrep) for an easy file search.
• Backup data, local machines do fail.