The process

1. Sign up for Digital Ocean (that's a referral link which you are in no way obligated to use)
2. Create a droplet (I've added my SSH key to Digital Ocean so I assign that to the droplet). I used Debian 7 x64
3. Point your domain's A record at the IP address Digital Ocean assigns to your droplet.
4. Log into the vps as root, create a new user and give it sudo permission, $ adduser new_user_name then $ visudo
5. In visudo find the line root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL replicate it just below and replace root with the username created above.
6. In your local project copy the default fabric dictionary from settings.py to local_settings.py and uncomment it
7. Fill in the fabric settings
8. Configure ALLOWED_HOSTS in deploy/live_settings.py, i.e., ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['example.com']
9. Open your project's requirements.txt and add pillow to a new line (This should get automatically installed by Mezzanine but for some reason isn't)
10. Run fabric $ fab all
11. Go to your site in your browser

Notes

Log locations

Logs end up in /var/log/ particularly:

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