How do you setup a personal staging environment for your web projects?

I want to setup a personal staging environment for QA testings or experiments for my web projects, but I do not know where to get started.

I am thinking of using Amazon Web Services as a platform to start creating a staging environment, but what are the steps to create a protected staging environment where it allows me to push updates into the live environment when needed? I am work with PHP, WordPress and Drupal mainly.