Alternately, I use vagrant-aws (https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws) to quickly do this on Amazon. Just be very careful to not check your keys into source control.
Yeah, VMs were my thought too -- VMs are easy to spin up and cheap/free, so why bother having everyone share one staging server? Use a configuration management tool like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/etc. to make sure everyone's staging VMs are configured the same, and you're good to go.