Since I’ve been planning on moving to a VPS server sometime in the coming months, I’ve been reading up on server administration. How to set up Linux to serve web pages and parse PHP, how to not leave the door wide open to attackers, how to manage Apache, all that jazz. It’s all rather complicated at a glance, though luckily not too much so once you get into it. I’m doing my best to prepare myself so I’m not overwhelmed when the time comes to switch servers.
The folks over at NETTUTS must be psychic or something. They seemed to know that I was semi-actively looknig for information on this topic, since they recently published a tutorial on setting up an Ubuntu webserver. I had a “well that’s cool” moment when I saw it in my feed reader.
All great websites have a great server behind them. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to set up a dedicated web server (with Apache, MySQL, and PHP) using that old computer you have lying around the house and some free software.
Link: How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for Free
The article shows you step-by-step, with a screenshot for every step, how to install Ubuntu and get it running Apache with PHP and MySQL. It’s long, but easy to follow and very informative.
If you’re like me, you’ll want to learn even more than one post can provide. 
So here are a few other guides and such worth taking a peek at.
