Have you considered doing something like pushing with git?
But doing git push all is out of the question for me, because I'm rsyncing while developing, so I'd need to constantly commit and push tiny nonsensical commits to the server, and then do a massive rebase afterwards. In effect, it's more work and gains me nothing.
The idea of repeatedly writing code and rsyncing it up to a production server while adding new features/whatever seems incredibly error prone to me. And that's not even to touch on whether or not there's automated testing (in the form of unit/integration/whatever tests in the code).
My reasons: I don't have to pollute my laptop with various (sometimes mutually exclusive) servers - virtualenv &co are great, but can only go so far, and VMs are much harder on the battery; trivial for other people (colleagues, clients) to see WIP, even if my laptop is suspended.