I'm spending a lot of time setting up new Centos 6 instances. I use a VCS (Subversion) for most of the config files and all of the webapp source files (Github), but even with excellent package managers (like yum, npm, easy_install, etc.) it still takes time.

I'd like to get to the point where I could try out a new potential web host by just signing up for an account, logging in and automatically sucking my standardised config onto the box.

I know there are a set of tools that can help:

Puppet
Chef
Vagrant

and a set of services that sell solutions:

[Jumpbox] http://www.jumpbox.com/
[BitNami Cloud] http://bitnami.org/cloud

I don't mind investing time in learning a new tool, but as a no-budget start-up, I'm keen to keep monthly costs down. My biggest concern is that time spent on the server config is time away from the codebase, and that's where I think my team and I should be investing our energy, at least until we get funded and scale up a bit. I'd be grateful of some recommendations for which way to jump on config:

1. stick with SSH and manual deploys, at least until you get big.
2. bite the bullet and learn [say] puppet. You may only use it 8-10 times, but it pays to have such an easy tunable server bootstrap.
3. don't bother, just pay the $100/month for a standard config service. It'll cost you $1000/year, but you should focus on the code.

Other questions in this domain

I use quite a complex stack (Drupal, Zend Server, MySQL, PHP, MongoDB, Python, django), but are there standard(ish) setups that include these or that I could build upon more quickly? Are the configs optimised for small, medium, large VPS (1GB, 4GB, 16GB)? How secure are they?