A stage or staging environment is an environment for testing that exactly resembles the production environment.[7].
It seeks to mirror the actual production environment as closely as possible and may connect to other production services and data, such as databases. For example, servers will be run on remote machines, rather than locally (as on a developer’s workstation during dev, or on a single test machine during test), which tests the effect of networking on the system.
The primary use of a staging environment is to test all installation/configuration/migration scripts and procedures, before they are applied to production environment. This ensures that all major and minor upgrades to the production environment will be completed reliably without errors, in minimum time.
Another important use of staging is for performance testing, particularly load testing, as this often depends sensitively on the environment.
Source: wikipedia