Server Install/setup - replication

Excuse me if this is a little verbose or unclear and rambling. In that context I am very open to suggestions of an alternative approach to what I am setting out to do also!

The background is that I am setting up a website and have a beta version on a server hosted for me by a friend, but one who does not want to be overly bothered and expects me to take care of business. I will then put the site live on another server hosted commercially (though again hosting is actually controlled by A.N.other and I do not have owner access). I do have sftp access to both, of course.

The site is simple and will be largely html with minimal php for file transfer - you can see it here in beta and here live if relevant.

I would like it to be trouble free in implementation and am considering using a spare PIII latitude C400 laptop (512MB ram) to make a mock up of the server on my own network to test - then save source and replicate target - then go live.

Finally the questions:-

will the server be viable on that hardware?

Is there a simple way to replicate a server-side environment given my access level? (I think this may be the show stopper)

Alternatively can you recommend a way to test file transfer functionality on both platforms? phpmyinfo is unavailable and this all begins from the premise that I need to have an upload button on the site and ensure file transfer will work on both.

Yes - I realise it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut - but if I can make a test server on that laptop it will be a useful resource and I am not averse to the learning curve and would hopefully have a fair chance with tutorials and suchlike.

A server should run just fine on that system - I ran my web server on a low end P4 with less RAM than that and it worked fine. It won't support thousands of concurrent users, but for testing it should be perfect.

I would think that you could use SFTP to replicate your copy of the site to the live server. It's not the ideal solution, but it should work. I do wonder if you'll have permission on a shared host (which is what it sounds like you're using) to do uploading through the web at all, but there might be some way. The only thing that I tend to have problems with when moving sites between servers is when pages have references to absolute addresses, in which case changing the server address breaks things. How big a problem that will be depends on the site.

You should be fine hardware wise. I had a php forum running on an old 1 GHz 512MB RAM that had about 100 users, most online at one time 20ish. You only need it to serve one page at a time for testing, so I think you'll be good.

For the paid host, have you paid them yet? I ask because any professional hosting service should give you the option of a Windows or Linux server, with one or all of the following connection methods: FTP, SFTP, SSH, Custom Web Interface (click, select, upload). Your connection will restrict you to your folder so not full user access, but you can easily transfer files with SCP or a GUI program like SecPanel. If your host doesn't offer this basic service, look for another host.

It is a little more expensive, but if you like you can have a host that is a Linux install just for you which you can configure how you please. Linode is the company - check their web site for more details.

As for "references to absolute addresses", general rule I follow is use references that get a DNS look up instead of an absolute IP address (www.example.com/somepage.php instead of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx./somepage.php). Then you just update your DNS service when you switch machines. Even better, the server should pick up the root regardless of where you are when on a remote host that is not yours. So make a variable at the top of your code that stores /var/www/sitename and use that for your direct assignments. Swap to / when you upload to the remote host and it should propagate to all your links.

I'd go to linode.com and get one of their hosted "machines" - you have full root access, you pick which distribution you want, etc