Ask HN: VPS for Dummies?

Everyone's different, you may find some of this useful to you.

Linode and Slicehost both have excellent documentation, forums and other resources, all publicly available whether you're a customer or not.

http://www.linode.com/community/

http://library.linode.com/

StackScripts, ready-made scripts to set up a box: http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/

Using Linux on your Linode - Linux System Administration: http://library.linode.com/using-linux/administration-basics

http://www.slicehost.com/community/

Ubuntu help for various releases: https://help.ubuntu.com/

11.04 Desktop, Server and Installation help: https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/index.html

11.04 Ubuntu Server Guide: https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/serverguide/C/index.html

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.htm...

The Linux System Administrator's Guid: http://tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/index.html

Linux Administration Made Easy: http://tldp.org/LDP/lame/LAME/linux-admin-made-easy/index.ht...

Linux Newbie Administrator Guide: http://lnag.sourceforge.net/

Shell Programming for Beginners: http://ontwik.com/linux/shell-programming-for-beginners/

man bash (i.e, read the man page)

Bash Reference Manual: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html

Linux Security Basics (particularly the bits on no root login, and locking down ssh): http://library.linode.com/security/basics

As mentioned by others already, the slicehost articles are great for installing and setting up a server (they have detailed guides for Ubuntu, centos, debian, etc.) A few things to be aware of:

1. Security. I can't stress this enough, as people new to managing their own VPS can end up doing some bad mistakes with respect to security, e.g. leaving root account login enabled, weak firewall etc. Make sure you do a bit of googling to make sure you get a good hang of the security aspects of hosting your sites on your own VPS.

2. Although you mentioned that your sites are low traffic ones, you might still want to choose a light weight webserver like nginx/lighthttpd over Apache, which can be quite heavy weight and need a larger slice.

3. You won't have any mail server by default, which is a free benefit in a shared hosting environment. Setting up and managing your own mail server can be nightmarish.. Look into something like Amazon Simple Email service for that.

I would highly recommend slicehost.com as a VPS host and they have a great library of tutorials (particularly helpful for linux newbies) http://articles.slicehost.com/.

Even if you don't get an account with them, you'll probably find the tutorials very useful.

if you have never SSH'd into anything before, I would recommend running a VPS and your shared hosting accounts in parallel until you get a better handle on Linux, then migrate your sites from shared hosting at that time.

Although I haven't checked recently, from memory as far as pricing goes, slicehost $ > linode $ > prgmr.com. Prgmr is true do it yourself though, so if your a complete linux newbie you may want to go the middle ground and get linode.com, and use the slicehost tutorials to get it up and running