With virtually everything in Drupal, there are two ways to accomplish a task: The Easy Way, or The Right™ Way.

Deploying a new Drupal site for the first time is no exception. The Easy Way – and almost certainly the most common way – is to simply copy your local version of the database to production (or staging), along with user-uploaded files. (Your code needs to be deployed too, and The Right™ Way to deploy it is with version-control, which you're hopefully using… but that's another story.)

The Right™ Way to deploy a Drupal site for the first time (at least since Drupal 7, and "with hurdles" since Drupal 6), is to only deploy your code, and to reproduce your database (and ideally also user-uploaded files) with a custom installation profile, and also with significant help from the Features module.

The Right Way can be a deep rabbit hole, though.

Image source: SIX Nutrition.

I've been churning out quite a lot of Drupal sites over the past few years, and I must admit, the vast majority of them were deployed The Easy Way. Small sites, single developer, quick turn-around. That's usually the way it rolls. However, I've done some work that's required custom installation profiles, and I've also been trying to embrace Features more; and so, for my most recent project – despite it being "yet another small-scale, one-dev site" – I decided to go the full hog, and to build it 100% The Right™ Way, just for kicks.

Does it give me a warm fuzzy feeling, as a dev, to be able to install a perfect copy of a new site from scratch? Hell yeah. But does that warm fuzzy feeling come at a cost? Hell yeah.