Moving house: shared hosting to VPS

I received a 'love letter' from my hosting provider: you have too many tables in your databases and are negatively impacting performance. You have 14 days to correct this or we will take your firstborn...or something to that effect. Mind you, my account comes with unlimited domains and 25 databases. I had about a dozen databases, but with almost all of them being Drupal that put me well over the 1000 table maximum they had introduced since I had signed up. I hate moving sites from one place to another, but in this case it didn't look like moving to a different shared hosting account would improve my lot.

The time had come, the rhino said, to think of many things, a VPS to call my own despite the stress that brings.

So, after asking and reading and searching and reading, I decided on Linode. I'm going to create a burst of small blogs regarding the steps to having a running server, but as a spoiler I'll say that I'm posting this on my new VPS, so it would appear that there were no issues in moving? HA! There are always issues in moving, but at least they were due to my ignorance and not the provider. More to come.