Best approach for maintaining a quality assurance server for several mid tier clients

Question

We are getting to the point where we have several mid tier clients that could benefit from a QA server, but none can afford to pay for a dedicated QA box as well as a dedicated production box. I've been toying with the idea of a virtual environment, either hosted in our office or with a third-party, that several clients could hit to view work in progress that would offset the total cost. Most of these sites will be a LAMP stack, but there is the potential every long once in a great while that a .NET or Java site would be thrown into the mix. I'm looking for a solid approach, but obviously not full implementation details.

Answer 1

All of our QA/Test environments are hosted on virtual boxes. We have exact replicas of our production server made into virtual servers for testing purposes. Just make sure when you set up the test environments you make them as close to the production box as you possibly can. This will give make your test results more viable and you won't run into "well it works in test, I don't know why it doesn't work in production" scenarios as much.