Finishing the setup of VPS server for Rails deployment

We have a VPS deployment server for Rails set up (but it is not live yet), but we may need to have it secured even better, and we definitely need to have a better Rails deoplyment environment. You need to have very good knowledge of both Linux (CentOS) server setup and Rails deployment and tuning. And you will need to tell us what we need :) Keywords of possible work involved: Set up domain name and email, better firewall setup, removing unnecessary services, auto-installing security updates, swap Apache with Nginx, Passenger, MyIsam, PHD... But you are the expert! If you like, you can do all the configuration from a clean CentOS installation. We also need a record of what has be done (which commands have been executed and which files had which changes). In the future (next project), we need to do performance testing and solve problems related to them (I am sure there will be), so you also need to be very good at figuring out where the bottlenecks are in our custom made Rails application. So if you also could quote your hourly rate, that would be nice.