For a project I'm on right now we're using VMs w/ Debian on developer workstations. Deploying the app is a tarball & a shell script on top of a base Debian install. Any time we need a new public server we spin up a new EC2 instance (Alestic Debian) & run the script.

Ticket tracking is a Google Spreadsheet w/ some formulas to calculate ticket sort orders, estimated completion dates, etc.

Works well for us on the budget we've got.