> concretely tho, it generally means hosting stuff on your own machine, on a connection you pay for. That's okay. But it's hard for non-specialists.

To this end, I'm optimistic about lightweight containers, especially a la docker.io[1]. Releasing an application as a container can help solve dependency hell. Nesting containers for a complex application (i.e. with multiple disjoint services) looks promising to me, as well.

[1] Not that LXC and/or docker are ready out-of-the-box for non-specialists (yet) - but that seems achievable. A friendly wrapper around vagrant might do the job.