Hi John,
I know this is an old post but I have a similar situation albeit only 600 miles away 
and am hoping you can shed some light on your remote location experience.
I’m currently a Wink user and am thinking of switching to ST for a number of reasons. One thing Wink has going for it is that I receive notifications about updates but they don’t happen automatically and I decide when they’re applied. I usually wait until I’m on-site to do them–that way if it all goes to crap I can power cycle the hub. No such option for the ST hub so I’m looking at a network controllable power switch or strip and another ST user suggested I look through project_secondhome for similar solutions.
I have an always on PC with BIOS settings to automatically power on after a power outage. We have a full time broadband connection and I can VPN into the computer using RealVNC. I can pickup a used Synaccess netBooter NP-02 on ebay for relatively cheaply. My thought was that if the hub were unresponsive I could VPN in to the PC and control the NP-02 using Putty to telnet into the thing. Since you’re already doing something similar I thought I’d reach out.
Any info, experience and ideas you can provide would be greatly appreciated 