Note: A large part of this is taken from Victor Kane's article on Awebfactory about setting up Drupal on a fresh Linode, but I've documented some other things here and did some things a little differently than he did, so I figured it'd be worth writing up a post on the process. I've kept the details thin here in places where Victor's notes are more than satisfactory, but I've made sure to note where that happens.
Update: Be sure to check out part 2 of this article, as well.
I've spent the last several months of my off-work hours plugging away at helping the folks over at Gamers With Jobs get rolling with an upgraded version of Drupal, and in the process we decided to move from a shared hosting environment to a place where we've got a lot more control over performance and site configuration. In the meantime, Victor Kane's article on getting Drupal up and running on a Linode came across my RSS reader and provided the kick in the pants I needed to really investigate it. I looked at several VPS options, but in the end Linode seemed to be the best. They offered a seven day money back guarantee, which honestly isn't much, but it was long enough for me to feel comfortable giving it a shot without being out sixty bucks, so I decided to try it out.