A good book I read is Reliably Deploying Rails Applications by Ben Dixon. It is available at Reliably Deploying Rails… by Ben Dixon [Leanpub PDF/iPad/Kindle]. It builds up the entire process using chef and Capistrano to provision servers and deploy the code.
For personal projects I am too busy (and lazy) to deal with setting up, deploying and monitoring servers. So I use cloud66 to manage servers and digital ocean for hosting.