Start to finish, I had my new EC2 Micro Instance up, running, with ZNC (w/ colloquy) installed in under a half hour. Not only was it freaking fast (~613mb RAM helps), but its free for a year. I took a snapshot of the install just in case, and now its golden. Firewalls, SSH keys, and package repos just worked.
shrugs Thankfully my only VPS is for play time, so I can move it around all I want, destroy, and rebuild it.
My only advice would be to fire one up, and try it out. Either its gotten a lot easier, or I've gotten a lot smarter. The former is far more likely. :)