Re: Local development and ISP hosting

[Arie Nagel]

It really depends on the possibilities the ISP is offering. You could, for instance, use phpMyadmin and I'm sure there are ISP's around who do.

That allows you to upload sql files that you can create locally using mysqldump.
If you're not familiar with mysqldump see here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/mysqldump.html

In a perfect world you could set up replication. Then your local database would be the master and the online database the slave. I doubt if there are reasonably cheap offers for that available but you could 'google' for it.