I was agreeing completely with this entire post up until you mentioned Aegir. Whilst I keep seeing lots of people who absolutely love Aegir, it's caused me so

I was agreeing completely with this entire post up until you mentioned Aegir. Whilst I keep seeing lots of people who absolutely love Aegir, it's caused me so many headaches that it really isn't worth it when you're planning on hosting just a single website. Instead I would look at Pantheon's Project Mercury. It's an entire Drupal stack based on Pressflow, MySQL, Memcached, APC, Varnish, ApacheSolr, BCFG2 and Hudson. Their main website is now really pushing their commercial hosted solution but it's still open source and available for download via Launchpad - check out http://groups.drupal.org/pantheon http://groups.drupal.org/pantheon