There is good reason to use the same environment. No one wants to be dealing with wacky version issues on remote servers, which is precisely what you would be signing up for.
Then I assume your development workstation is an exact duplicate of a production server, and is serving a production load?
Even getting a staging environment to realistically resemble production is an incredibly difficult undertaking. Your development environment is a joke, sorry. If you're expecting it to resemble production in any way, I don't know what else to say except you're extremely confused about how a production environment actually works, or your production environment is a pathetic joke which serves a nonexistent userbase.
