Still on the Gandi hosting thing. In addition to L2FProd.com website, I also moved here heardontv.com (looks like I now highly depend on Gandi - don’t fail me guys!).

First thing first I immediately installed munin to monitor my server. I had performance issues before with my Rails app (previously hosted by hostingrails.com) and at that time I did not have the right tool to monitor the app and understand the slow downs - now with root access I can do anything.

Munin gives you the basic history graphs for CPU, memory, disk (by day and by week) but it also comes with plug-ins for applications like Apache, MySQL.

I found detailed instructions at http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-monitoring-a-server-with-munin.