After encountering a brick wall with localhosting for a decade, I was easily able to get WAMPserver working, a couple-few years back. I am preparing to move to XAMPP now. I have not been using a remote host since I got the local going (and I have fantasies of doing 'lite' hosting, from my desktop (see Vladimir Prevolac above)).

'Course, I also have Ubuntu (under Windows) since v9.6, and have installed LAMP on it both piecemeal and using their 'meta-package' install. (there is also the separate "Ubuntu Server" distro which one can download, instead of standard Ubuntu; I am going to try this on a USB stick).

I believe there are also localhost packages like we use on Windows, for Ubuntu/Linux. I skipped over these and went straight for the full server environment, since it seemed easy enough. I am reconsidering and will be taking a good look at Ubuntu localhost options.