You call it "testing"? :-) Well, doing something like this is a must, practically. Do the following: deploy this script:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
and see what happens when you load this page from the client side.
Please see:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.phpinfo.php[
^].
As you are so fresh to all this (which is perfectly normal), I'm not sure it's already a time to work with some outside hosting on the Web. I would suggest you can learn things and even develop everything locally. You can install Apache, PHP (and other Apache module you may need) locally and do all the work on your local computer. Likewise, you could use your corporate internal network (Intranet), if you have one.
—SA