I've just moved up to a VPS box and I want to know if there is a recommended or suggested way to run a sort of poor mans dev, test and live environment?

I'm looking at all the options and wondering if frame forwarding would work (where I switch the underlying physical position the frame forwarded domain points to) or if this would cause a search engine nightmare.

Should I just set up separate domains (that are not registered with DNS so I can see them but its hard for anyone else to) and then physically mv the httpdocs folder and various SQL databases?

Is there something clever I could do with symbolic links or by editing Apache to change where the pages are served from?

If anyone can point me to any blogs or explanations of something that would work I'd be very interested!

Thanks!

Thank you for your answer, I hadn't thought of using Subversion but I guess I'm about out of practice. I think I used something like CVS (or a precursor?) more than 12 years ago when coding in C++.

To be honest the site won't change so dramatically in terms of files, but the SQL databases will be where most of the action is: Mediawiki, Wordpress and phpList.

I note that Subversion is used to maintain the Mediawiki code, is it easy to get running on my own server at Lunarpages? I'm not really sure which flavour of Linux I'm running at LP!

That's why we use Centos . Please update this port if you have more questions on this.

I have cpanel on my account, I have created another user and use su_php like lunar does for their shared accounts.
This lets me play in sandbox mode on my live server, if I run a bad script that sucks up resource usage, my server stops it and prevents the user (thanks to su_php running apache/php as the user) from using to many resources so my site just takes a little bump in page creation times.
I usually then use my both ftp accounts and with tab views I drag files from one tab to another (I think this is a transmit [for mac os x] only feature though) and it quickly downloads and uploads the files. Though on really big scripts I have done, I used the root account via ssh to move and change permissions on all files very fast.

Though I would suggest as well for a real nice sandbox mode to set up on your computer manually (this takes time to get it right) that emulates your live version setup. This way all tests can be done right on your computer, and its easier than always uploading file changes I went so far on this as to emulate the cpanel setup with /home directories linked up properly.