[eluser]John Fuller[/eluser]
You are using too much effort to figure out your production environment. It is counter productive to get stressed over something like this.
Just use basic tools that are easy to use and spend free time on the side to evaluate new tools.
Forget IDE at first, just a bunch of stuff to learn and configure. Pickup a decent editor like E-text editor or something free like Jedit. Evaluate IDE's when you have to to do it.
FTP upload support. First off, you should be using SFTP which gives you the same sort of functionality except over SSH. Most hosts should have this available. Don't get too caught up in the terminology, just ask your host if they support it, if they don't go with another host that has it.
Then, take a look at SFTPDrive and mount the SFTP connection just like it is a local drive. Open files and edit them from that mounted drive just as they were on your local system. SFTP drive just works right out of the box and you don't have to know SFTP commands. The only problem I have found is that Java based editors (Jedit, Eclipse, Netbeans) are too slow with SFTPDrive.
(Edit: You probably don't want to do development directly on your production app, so setup a development instance and a production instance (set them up like two separate websites, one could be dev.domain.com.) Develop your app until you feel you are at a point to roll out a new "version" and then roll over the changes to the production side for maintenance and upgrades.)
SVN support. As others have mentioned, use TortoiseSVN as an interface on your local system. I suggest getting an account with a web based SVN host just because they make SVN a little easier to deal with. Look at WarehouseApp.
If SVN is too confusing or is holding you up. Don't use it and come up with something more simple (copy and zip archive system maybe) while you are evaluating SVN in your spare time. You don't have to use SVN.
Project Management. Again, use something very simple at first and evaluate others in your spare time. If you are looking at something to use for collaborating with clients and other developers then BaseCamp is decent. You may find you want something different down the road but BaseCamp is simple, easy to use and you will have time to look elsewhere before you grow out of it.
Trying to come up with the perfect system is a black hole. You can spend all your time trying to accomplish it and never get any work done. All you will end up doing is getting frustrated. Some of these things are tricky to get the hang of and if you try to learn them all at once then you will just end up spinning your wheels. Use what you know right now and then bring in new things incrementally.
(Edit: There may be better tools and methods than listed here but the point is to keep things simple. other people chiming in with their own tricky systems they have learned and/or developed over time won't fix your problem.)
