We highly recommend you develop web sites within a Linux environment, in particular setting up an Ubuntu local development environment, as your site hosting is likely to be Debian or Ubuntu. To do so when you own a Mac OS X or Windows personal computer, you can run Linux very effectively in a virtual machine, such as VirtualBox (free for Windows or Mac, see virtualbox.org) or VMWare (including VMWare Fusion for running Linux – and Windows – on Mac OS X).