Web developers - Is it better to do development on your local machine or on a remote host?

Question

What are the pro/cons of doing web development on your local machine rather than on a centralized development server? For those that do dev on your local machine, how do you kee

Answer 1

I've been building a site in Ruby on Rails and I've been doing development locally but deploying to a remote machine as often as I can. I read in Agile Web Development with Rails that the more you practice the deploying the better because when it comes time to deploy to production - there will be no surprises.