I tried mining ALT-coins with a VPS (cpu mining) several months ago... I heared it even got harder to break even nowadays...
I spent a lot of time comparing VPS distributors, and finding the most profitable coins to mine... But in the end, the VPS cost more than the coins it produced...
Mining with a VPS is not that hard (basically, just making sure you have all dependancys installed, and chosing a precompiled miner... It's hard to compile anything on a VPS due to memory restrictions) , if you run into some problems, you can always PM me, and i can try to point you in the right direction...
There are MANY different guides. What are you trying to run it on as far as VPS? What coin are you using?
But do make sure to do some ROI math. Only time I VPS mine now is if I have a promo and it's been a while since I have done that.
Well... I ran XMG, riecoin, axiom,.... Mostly on a cheap ramnode 1 CPU VPS (they have really cheap VPS's with 1 vCPU and slow disks... Costing close to nothing).
In the end, it was just money thrown away, since for every dollar i spent on VPS hosting, i made 70 cents (if i remember correctly)...
It was basically a fair warning for the OP: it's really fun and nice to setup a VPS and try cpu mining... If you do everything correctly, you'll have tons of fun and experience, but it's not a get-rich-quick scheme... It's very hard (or almost impossible) to make a real profit (as far as i know)