Before joining Arms of War, it was running on a server on what you'd expect. The code was deployed via FTP, the database was installed to the VPS, and everything needed to be managed by the administrator. This is fine if you're not looking for scale, but its messy, disorganized, and can take a lot of time to figure out why one environment doesn't work compared to another environment.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.pbbg.com/boxing-your-code/