New to bitcoin but curious to gain experience with it and having two Virtual Private Servers (both Linux Debian 'Squeeze' based) operational for other things, I have installed a bitcoin node on each of them.
My experiences:
No luck with the downloaded v 0.8.6. 32 bit binaries. Both VPSes have enough disk to hold the blockchain (for now) although it seems urgent to add functionality to bitcoind to prune and compact history to only essential bits.
One VPS has 1GB RAM, the other 500MG.
The 0.8.6 starts loading & checking blocks at a rapid pace but around block count 250.000 really does not advance anymore.
So on one, using a torrent client, downloaded bootstrap.dat, the 279k block version. This was a matter of 15 minutes for some 13G, demonstrating the very good internet connectivity of the VPS.
Located bootstrap.dat in the data directory, which in my installation is set in bitcoin.conf as it is not the default one.
I make bootcoind run as 'bootcoin' user and group and use a data directory accessible to that user and group.
That in itself works; a wallet is made there and all processes start seemingly normal. But after a day of two there is hardly further progress although the CPUs on the VPS are really busy.
It seems bootstrap.dat never got touched in the way intended. There may be path issues around that feature in the code. Tried various symbolic links to the bootstrap.dat file from other 'default' locations to the data directory
but this did not change anything. Also tried the 'loadblock' configuration parameter with the path to bootsstrap.dat. Could only conclude that this 0.8.6. binary was going nowhere on either server.

So downloaded the source code, 'bitcoin-master', version 0.999 and compiled that. Actually the compilation went fairly smooth on both VPSes after installing a few essential packages.
Noticed a remarkable size difference between the 0.8.6 (6.3 MB) downloaded bitcoind binary and the compiled 0.9.9 (46.1 MB) one.
Restarted bitcoind on basis of the 0.999 binaries, on both VPSes, with exactly the same configuration as before and both have re-accelerated getting and verifying blocks from where v 0.86 left it. After a day both reached sync without a need for bootstrap.dat.

The CPU on a VPS is very busy during the block chain build-up and checks. It can take a long time before any answer is given to commands via RPC. If you are not patient and break-off the commands that are waiting, or have a web interface to RPC that reaches a wait time limit, the number of threads available (4 in default set up) may easily be busy and effectively control is lost over bitcoind. Only killing bitcoind and restarting it via its startup script then restores control.
Bitcoind produces loads of debug info; a bit much to my taste and decided to send it to console with the setting in bitcoin.conf. In daemon mode that effectively gets rid of the debug logging.
Since having reached sync CPU cycles have much reduced and now both VPSes easily keep up with new transactions.
So in conclusion can recommend the more recent code when you have problems reaching sync.