It seems like a good practice to have a development site that you work on locally and then migrate/update that to a live website, or putting it into production as some might say. This is of course not necessary, but probably on the list of best practices.
These posts I make to document my first impressions and experience are generally just notes about the process that I might look back on later since it takes some time for information to stick. Even the pros in the business got their cheat sheets and google as best buddies.
The hosting and local
There is no standard server setup, so many components and pieces that come together to allow you to have a website live on the internet. The operating system, the databases, programming languages and versions, interfaces and management systems. I will admit right now that I am no server expert and probably never will be, but just like how it matters what pieces and software your computer contains can effect how your games work, same goes for the server setup.
If you are lucky, then everything goes smoothly and customer service saves the day if anything comes up. But I learned a great deal while struggling with my hosting to figure out why things weren't as smooth as I hoped it would be, and hopefully it will help others to not waste time on running in too many circles.
Easiest way to help things go smoothly would probably be to have your local setup mirror the hosting. To have the same database types and versions of software. I am currently using XAMPP which gives me Apache server and MariaDB database.
Issues with phpMyAdmin
The most important thing for your website is probably the backups, without them you cannot restore your website if something goes wrong, and backups are also used to migrate the website from one place to another.
So of course I got concerned when I got errors while importing the database export. I learned after a whole week of running around trying to solve things on my end that the database issues I had could be solved by simply updating the phpMyAdmin because the hosting apparently had a outdated version and wanted to blame the issues on Drupal because "Wordpress works fine".
Basically the database exports via the phpMyAdmin were causing the issue, which was a but fixed in PMA 4.4.4 (my hosting was usting 3.9.x).