An excellent article - these are lessons most people learn the hard way. I'll second the recommendation for using Chef or something like it to manage your syste

An excellent article - these are lessons most people learn the hard way. I'll second the recommendation for using Chef or something like it to manage your system configuration. It makes building new servers based on your configuration trivial (say if you wanted to move VPS hosts). Additionally, if you use Chef, you can use Vagrant[1], you can replicate your production or staging environments locally in VirtualBox. Also, not to pimp my own stuff, but I wrote a thing about generating test data with Ruby some time ago. I've used this strategy a number of times and it works really well: http://larrywright.me/blog/articles/215-generating-realistic-test-data-with-ruby http://larrywright.me/blog/articles/215-generating-realistic... [1]: http://vagrantup.com/ http://vagrantup.com/