psy: In what experience I had, the biggest barrier is doing the initial load of the blockchain. It was fairly I/O intensive and wrought havoc with my VPS. I eventually had to give up (as it would have taken several days to finish), and run it instead on my local machine. However, the particular host machine my VPS is on has had a history of high I/O load from other users, so it's possible it might work better elsewhere.
Yeah, it took several hours for me too, the first time. It was really frustrating actually when debugging it, when the integrity breaks near the end and you have to restart everything just to debug it!

But, if you can manage to get a somewhat recent dump of the db, inserting the new missing blocks is faster. The latest backup I have is from late august and is about 420M.