Not to detract from the excellent answers, but I suggest you step up a level and think about how to minimize (and ideally eliminate) the amount of remote editin

Not to detract from the excellent answers, but I suggest you step up a level and think about how to minimize (and ideally eliminate) the amount of remote editing you need to do. In particular, the Twelve Factor App (http://12factor.net/ http://12factor.net/) (by the founder of Heroku) had a big impact in my thinking of how to remotely deploy and administer. In particular "1. One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys" and "X. Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible". Note that these approaches are applicable to any hosting provider and technology. Now, there are times (especially when you're debugging a breakdown in dev/prod parity) where it is enormously helpful to ssh into a remote machine. But I would endeavor to minimize those occurrences.