Noli's questions

I would like to set up a Few QA servers for a web application, under the app domain, however I would not like these servers to be accessible to just everyone from the Internet. Ideally, the QA team could authenticated themselves, and then begin testing the web site.

I've been reading about VPNs, would that be an appropriate solution to this problem? My QA servers are VPSs on digital ocean. I see there are multiple types of VPN servers as well, so it's not clear what protocol I Should set up, or what steps I should take to get this operational

Thanks

Edit: the Team is completely distributed, so many will be working from their homes

I'm trying to back up a file via the command

scp /tmp/backup.tar.gz hostname:/home/user/backup.tar.gz

When I run it, the scp progress bar shows up and it looks like its transferring the file, however when I log into the destination server to check the file, the timestamp and filesize haven't changed from the older version, so it looks like scp didn't overwrite the old file at all. It only sees to work when I manually delete the file from the destination server.

I'm running ubuntu, and this is happening on two servers: one cygwin ssh, and one fedora core 3.

Anyone have any idea why this is happening? I thought scp would ONLY overwrite existing files..

Thanks