Hi,
Are there any hosting companies that specialize in hosting a remote development environment?
I am looking to have vs.net, sqlserver, subversion (and install my other development tools) so I can access my environment remotely from anywhere.
+1
A:
Check out The Planet, they let you do that, but it's expensive. Most hosting companies that are affordable give you a type of Control Panel that interfaces with internal tools, but you're not going to get what you're looking for.
As an alternative I would suggest this instead of paying for expensive hosting:
Step 1) Enable Remote Connections on your home PC. This will allow you to start a Remote Desktop session. I think from your post you know how to do this.
Step 2) Go to http://www.dyndns.org, or any other free Dynamic DNS site, and register for a free dynamic DNS account. What this gives you is a static address pointing to your dynamic IP at home. So blankman.dyndns.org will resolve to ###.###.###.### which is the IP on your home computer/router.
Step 3) If you're directly connected to your Modem skip to Step 5 and download the Dynamic DNS client that they should offer (this will run on your PC and keep your IP synced with your static address) . If you're behind a router, most routers have an option to use a DynDns account. Go to that setting and enter in your DynDns username/password. This will allow your router to ping DynDns periodically and let it know what your IP address is.
Step 4) Forward TCP/IP requests on port 3389 to your PC on your network: 192.168.0.### or whatever it is.
Step 5) Make sure you allow port 3389 in your Firewall settings
Step 6) If you're on the go, you can then start up Remote Desktop, type in "blankman.dyndns.org" into the address box and it should connect directly to your home PC. A lot of companies block this port so try it at a friends house or at a coffee shop.
I'm sure there are other ways to do it, but I've been doing this for years and it's worked great for me.
A friend of mine has a nice site for more RDP questions so that might be helpful to fill in the blanks and also if you have to enable multiple remote desktop sessions on the same PC.
hunter
2009-02-27 15:29:47