I'm working at a tiny start-up, and our budget is tight, but we do have one. Currently all developers work on a single server using separate virtual hosts. This is problematic because each needs his own php include path for command line scripts, but that's not doable with virtual hosts... I know ideally each developer would have their own box, but budget doesn't allow for that. Staging & Production have their own servers and dedicated include paths. What's a good way to ensure that development is as close to staging/production as possible? Is there a hosting company that can provide some kind of virtual machine clone of production? Is there some other strategy we should be using?
We are currently running CentOS, MySQL 5.1.x, Apache 2.x, PHP 5.1.x