If you want to start it manually via ssh, press ctrl+z to suspend the process, then type bg to resume it in the background. Finally disown to detach the background process from the shell, then you can safely disconnect your ssh session.
But yeah, running it on startup via cron is the best way. Run crontab -e as the user you want to run bitcoind as and add an @reboot line. See man cron for more info.
The startup script seemed to work well. Works flawlessly when shutting down and restarting.