[teh_klev]

> many hosters firewall their hosts for outgoing connections to prevent spam, botnets etc.

That's not really true. Even on our shared hosting platform (non-shell) we permit http/https/ftp outbound connections, and we're pretty conservative.

We also expect our customers to build and test their stuff locally then push up a working and hopefully error free site to our servers. We consider our servers production-only environments and will actually take you down if you're generating more than a few errors an hour, because errors and exceptions are expensive.

That said I do kind of agree with your sentiment about some "simple" projects that use everything under the sun just to get a todo list app built, even on my local dev env.