Creating Environments

Applies to: All

Overview

An environment is a separate running copy of your website. Most teams use at least two: one for testing changes and one for the public live site. This guide explains when to add another environment and what it costs.

Key concepts

  • Dev / development — playground for experiments; visitors should not rely on it.
  • Staging — polished copy for internal review before go-live.
  • Production / prod / live — the copy visitors and customers use after you attach your domain.
  • Provisioning — FlexSite building the new copy; wait for ready before syncing content into it.

Atom projects typically have one environment. Codeless and FlexLab support multiple copies.

When you need another environment

  • Editors prepare content on staging, then you promote it to production with Sync Environment.
  • Agencies keep a dev copy for training without touching the live site.
  • FlexLab links each environment to a Git branch so code can flow dev → staging → prod.

Prerequisites

  • Permission to manage environments on this project.
  • Enough credits on Billing — creating an environment spends credits immediately and may add monthly usage.

Steps — add an environment

  1. Open Environments in the project sidebar.
  2. Click Add environment (or Create environment).
  3. Enter a short name your team understands (staging, prod, qa).
  4. Review the default server size (CPU, RAM, cache) shown in the dialog — you can tune later under Build Settings.
  5. Submit and wait until status shows ready on Overview.

After creation

  1. Open the new environment Overview.
  2. Adjust Build Settings if this copy needs more power than a quiet dev sandbox.
  3. Configure Domain Settings only when this copy should have its own hostname (common on production).
  4. Track spend under Billing → Usage.

FlexLab note

New environments are tied to Git branches. Your developer pushes code to the matching branch to deploy content and configuration to that copy.