[imperialWicket]

If a lot of your projects end up on shared hosting solutions, it's difficult to streamline effectively. Depending on the provider and the hosting tier (single domain, unlimited, whatever), SSH access may be available or not. For a lot of those hosting arrangements, a process centered around FTP is the safest.

Given that limitation, I would definitely echo the importance of version control, and then highlight that a text editor capable of edits over an FTP connection can save a lot of trouble. I like UltraEdit, although it's commercial - it does have a full use trial period though. On Windows, I believe Notepad++ and Crimson Editor will also support edits over FTP. Be careful with an FTP capable text editor though, it's easy to make changes outside of your vcs this way.