Exactly what security issues are you having with your local server? You can configure apache to only accept requests from your own computer, and if you have a firewall and antivirus running you should be pretty secure. Apache.exe may have crashed due to a misconfiguration, have you edited httpd.conf? For me, developing locally is really the only option for building a site, but maintenance isn't too bad on remote sites when you're only changing a few things at a time.
If you still really want to develop remotely, you can edit the .htaccess file. Put this in an .htaccess at the highest level directory that you want to protect on your remote develpment server:
Code:
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from my.ip.address
where you change my.ip.address to your ip address.