Everybody knows that it is much easier to develop a website on a local server first before uploading it to the actual web server. The turnaround time for testing and fixing is just that much quicker using a local server.

Typically one would not really set up an actual Linux server to work on, although that is certainly possible and lots of companies do exactly that, but we prefer to make use of what is commonly known as a WAMP server - a portable, standalone application that combines Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl. A WAMP server therefore is like running a fully fledged Apache server on your Microsoft Windows PC.