A year or so ago I stumbled over Koding (my referral , if you're feeling benevolent), a social development platform that gives you (and everybody on your team) a disposable Ubuntu virtual machine, a web-based SSH terminal and code editor, and a giant network of fellow devs. It's a nifty place, and I've used it to collaborate with friends, teach myself Django and R and AngularJS and CoffeeScript, work through Coursera algorithms homework , develop new web applications, test documentation , play with Node mod
Koding VMs sit behind a proxy, so SSH-ing in from an external system already requires some finangling . PHPStorm's remote deployment system is entirely finangle-free, so getting it communicating with Koding would be impossible without our secret weapon: SSH tunnels!
I already had a PuTTY session saved for Koding, so I copied it to preserve the proxy settings. (I'm going to assume you've already got external SSH access to your VM working. If you don't, check out the official docs --I even helped write them!)