Here's the one question/problem I see-<p>How often do you really want to show someone something badly enough that you are willing to block your local dev environment to do so?<p>I could see it working if you are interactively talking to someone in chat, but over email, often times you could be waiting hours for someone to actually try out what you want them to see. You could certainly get around this by setting up a separate local 'dev-show' environment, but if you are going to all that effort you really could/should just set up a dev version on a vps/cloud server.<p>If you are talking to someone interactively, chances are they are another dev, which means they really don't need to see your environment running, they should be capable of using their own.<p>Also, in this thread I really feel people are exaggerating the level of effort to set up a 'showable' environment on a cloud instance. For rails as an example, I can go from server launch to a running app with db in less than 15 minutes (easily) with manual config and I really doubt I'm the exception here. Remember, this is a 'dev' environment still, your apache/nginx config doesn't have to be airtight, it just has to work for the single user you are showing it to (all defaults on everything is going to work at least as well as the built in rails server).<p>Not to mention the fact that if you aren't thinking about automating deployments yet, it's a really good investment of time and would work just as well for this case.