Server

If you have some stackscript, like you might have on VPS like Linode, where you have automaticly installed some linux distribution like Debian, and then Apacher, PHP and MySQL are also installed, this will not work out of the box, you will still need to add some extra stuff on your VPS so you could install some drupal sites.

1. You should enter following commands to set the hostname, replacing duck with the hostname of your choice:

Sometimes your drupal DB will have problems, and it will cause slow queries, especially when having many nodes. Log to you phpMyAdmin and select all tables in DB and click optimize or repair, this could fix many problems and make your site run smooth again. There is also module for this http://drupal.org/project/db_maintenance/ that should do the same thing and can be run on CRON.