I live on a big island in the southern hemisphere. Working remotely on a Linode is painful due to latency even with mosh. I tied Fremont for ages but the latency was too much so I moved to Tokyo which is a little better but I still prefer to work with a VM locally. Vagrant gets the job done but I would prefer an alternative.
I don't like Ruby. I don't like running virtualbox when I could be running an lxc jail with something like docker. I think I will be ditching OS X and moving back to a Linux desktop as soon as I find the right laptop.
My VPS is in London, never noticed any latency in Turkey and US. I guess Linode now has bunch of more cities, check them out.
For laptop, I recommend Macbook Air. The design, is a master piece of minimalism. As a guy who used Xmonad for years, I think OSX and a Linux VPS is the zen combo.
Turkey is really close to London. Domestic traffic in Australia travels further than that. It is quite a different matter round tripping packets across the pacific to another continent. I can do minor edits on a Linode but I much prefer using a local solution like vagrant. I would like to ditch OSX but the hardware/os combo is hard to beat.
I don't like Ruby. I don't like running virtualbox when I could be running an lxc jail with something like docker. I think I will be ditching OS X and moving back to a Linux desktop as soon as I find the right laptop.