That sounds great. I like to mess around a bit with droplets but I'm always afraid I create security leaks. A standard droplet with all the things you'de want in a Laravel project (Redis, rocketeer, etc.) would be great!

No such thing really. Projects are different and have different requirements. Some people are more comfortable with CentOS, others with Ubuntu. Some projects need stuff like load balancing or Varnish. Apache or Nginx. Whatever you do, in the end you or someone from your team will have to maintain the droplet, make regular updates and backups. It's not that hard really. Digital Ocean has lots of great tutorials and then there's also the newsletter at http://serversforhackers.com/.

I'm sure that people will help you out if you have specific questions, but I doubt that a one-fits-all solution is gonna happen or even possible.

Yeah i wasn't thinking of something that has EVERYTHING as it would be impossible or bloated. Just something that has the general things you need...

A free control panel Email Composer Mysql PhpMyAdmin All the Laravel dependencies Firewall

all configured so its an easy boilerplate server to start from. DigitalOcean does has some great tutorials and I'm running a droplet now with Laravel on it, it works well. But... it was a pain to setup and configure everything, and I'm still not comfortable that its up to date and as secure as it could be. Doing it all via ssh is hard to remember is your not 100% comfortable with terminal etc... I can't even remember 50% of the stuff i added to the droplet, so i would probably end up forgetting to update them in the future etc... Adam.

Maybe you need something like this: https://serverpilot.io/

Hey, I've been playing with a Digital Ocean VPS lately (10 dollar coupon + 5 paypal) and managed to install with no problem Laravel. The thing is i'm running the server over LEMP (nginx and php-fpm) not over apache. I could do this again in a clean server and share. Can't provide zPanel as it doesn't support nginx and would have to research about email though. (postfix and dovecot)

Mail servers are more trouble than they are worth, really. Use something like Google Apps or Zoho Mail instead or pay someone who really knows what they're doing.

I just re-did my Vagrant machine with SaltStack and it makes things really easy and is quite easy to set up as well. Will be switching our production servers across to it as well end of July when the first service pack for Ubuntu 14.04 becomes available. I can open-source our basic salt states then.

If you are not good at server side. And don't want to mess around the DigitalOcean droplets. You can check out a solution like >> http://www.cloudways.com/en/

They are also recommended by DigitalOcean on their website https://www.digitalocean.com/community/projects/cloudways

They also provide a quick one-click install with Laravel 5.0.4 version. Recently, they are offering a 50% discount on DigitalOcean servers of 2GB and above. http://www.cloudways.com/blog/digitalocean-hosting-50-percent-discount/

Ummm... Laravel Forge + Digital Ocean, that's about as simple as it gets.