I've read many comments on this thread regarding usability and value-prop of online IDEs. Here are some points from a perspective of a developer who was relying heavily on Nitrous.
1. I was able to patch my production apps from anywhere.
2. I was able to deploy my apps, in-case my hosting service provider decided to reboot the servers while I was at home, away from my development machines.
3. I was able to build new features, on alternate git branches, while enjoying at home with my family.
4. I was able to host new features, from a development branch, and let my colleagues provide real-time feedback.
I am one of the developers who will be crippled if online IDEs like Nitrous go away.
I do that all now with a mixture of rdesktop/rdp and SSH and occasionally Emacs tramp mode over a VPN.
Basically if I have my local emacs I can use it even when the dev, test and prod servers are 1000 miles away, and if I don't have my emacs (on my tablet or something) then its rdesktop/rdp and run my IDE remotely.
My current employer is pretty chill with all my machines being 1000 miles away in a corporate national data center, but is not chill with the idea that some 3rd party will host the critical development path and connectivity could disappear at their whim.
Its the classic "cost too low" problem for PaaS. My code, no matter how important it is to me or my employer, cannot be worth more than $39/mo to Nitrous in some kind of worst case scenario. Actually its only worth their cost of sales to replace me, which might be higher or lower, but certainly isn't a lot of money. On the other hand my management team can escalate a locally hosted problem such that a big enough problem might in theory cost multiple sysadmins their job, maybe their boss too, lets say a max of $500K/yr if multiple people got fired for over the top gross misconduct. That means my boss has AT LEAST a thousand times more leverage in case of problems with self hosted vs PaaS. There's a big difference between "eh $40 here, $40 there, who cares about that trouble ticket" and "our shared veep said you'd fix ticket #24153 before going home today or you're unemployed". "I don't care if your total budget is $10M/yr or a thousand people are sitting down waiting until its fixed, you're only worth $40/mo to me and not a penny more, tough luck".
I mean, seriously, 14 days warning? I've taken longer than two week vacations. Imagine coming back from a long vacation and trying to log in to get some work done and finding out everything was wiped a week ago, LOL.
1. I was able to patch my production apps from anywhere.
2. I was able to deploy my apps, in-case my hosting service provider decided to reboot the servers while I was at home, away from my development machines.
3. I was able to build new features, on alternate git branches, while enjoying at home with my family.
4. I was able to host new features, from a development branch, and let my colleagues provide real-time feedback.
I am one of the developers who will be crippled if online IDEs like Nitrous go away.