The document discusses various options for hosting web applications in the cloud, including Platform as a Service providers like Google App Engine and Heroku, as well as do-it-yourself options using virtual private servers. It then introduces Hostout and Silverlining as tools that use the Buildout framework to deploy applications to remote servers, allowing code to be built and deployed automatically from a single configuration. Hostout uses Fabric scripts while Silverlining provides predefined server environments, and both are presented as alternatives to manually copying code for each deployment.