That's how we did it at my first gig with PHP and Drupal. I'm not going to say it was great or even particularly good, but given our work was split across different modules, you could easily have multiple people either uploading changes over FTP or doing some quick hacks over SSH. After all, you only needed to copy over your changes and not re-deploy the entire project. The server was a little Dell box sat under the desk of the 'CTO' in his office.

There were some cowboy-level engineering practices for sure, to the point that I'm not sure you could call it 'software engineering', but there was definitely some beauty in the simplicity of that setup compared to what we typically have to do these days. At least after you set up the box and the access to it, anyway.