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I thought it might be helpful to any other volunteer that may have been silently following this thread to quickly post the issues with my VPS Tor server that were resolved.
1. Setting up iptables allowed connections to my server.
2. Adding my server's [ip address] to the /etc/torrc resolved the problem of tor attempting to connect to the "node" my server is on rather than the actual ip my server is on.
3. Checking the user groups and permissions necessary to allow access to tor files.
Other thoughts: As mentioned numerous times arm is a comfy frontend, but certainly not necessary after investigating system tools such as lsof and utilizing nload or munin. Also having ntp installed and running is helpful I think.
Again thanks for all the help and have a very happy holiday season!