I recently moved my most complicated Drupal site (a Bulgarian dialectology project with six inter-connected content types and thousands of nodes) from Bluehost to a dedicated Ubuntu 10.04 server; some of the views were exhausting the memory provided by a shared commercial hosting setup. The process reminded me that a skilled, patient sysadmin is worth their weight in antimatter ("gold" would be a serious undervaluation), but in stumbling through it on my own I discovered a few tricks that might save someone else the same frustration.