At the recommendation from @ben I am giving ServBay a try; I normally use Mamp Pro.
I wanted to see if I could use debugging in PHPStorm to be able to single step through PHP code in a published Elements website, while testing my upcoming Elements Blog. Trying to set this up in Mamp Pro looked a bit complicated at first glance. It was relatively easy in ServBay as they have good documentation on how to do it.
The answer is that it works well. However, initially I was getting a timeout (503 error) after a minute or so from php; not helpful when slowly single-stepping through PHP code. 
I found that the answer is to add request_terminate_timeout = 1200 as an additional setting to the PHP config (where 1200 is the number of seconds), see image below:
I thought I would share just in case any other developer tries using PHPStorm with ServBay or for that matter any other debugger with ServBay. 