A good tutorial for managing a server/VPS?

[Tim]

it's better to be paying an extra $20 or so a month, than have to pay $50+/hour of work

Yeah I am starting to see that, a managed server comes with apache and everything installed correct? Does an unmanaged one come with that? I would like to learn everything so one day I can run an unmanaged one.

Sorry I can't give you anything specific, but, your question isn't really that specific as there are so many moving parts with a server.

Ok, I'll clarify a bit more on what I think I need the help with, I am mainly looking for something to guide me through the initial setup and securing the server initially. After that I can just use google but no VPS providers I could find had a setup guide in their help documents.

Ps. Thanks DAMINK™, if you do purchace a VPS with them can you PM me a site your hosting on it so I can see how much faster it's going to be than over seas hosting.