We always hear people saying ubuntu works well only when you have a strong internet connection as the Install CD doesn't contain all the packages required agreed now a CD cannot contain all the packages you require so you need to download the packages but there is a clear misunderstanding among new users that they always need to download these packages, Its essential to download them once but if you are reinstalling ubuntu on new machine you need not download these packages all over again if you have installed required packages on one of the machine you can use the content of below listed directory for installation

/var/cache/apt/archives

this directory contains the debian packages download by the apt-get :)

so have fun reuse the content for each install and save time and bandwidth

I am sure you would have thought atleast once of hosting your website from your machine itself, if not the website atleast a sandbox version of it as it would be comparatively easy for you to maintain it so i discuss the steps you need to follow to achieve this, first lets go through the requirements, in this post i am talking about small sized sites a minor modified version of this post is applicable for large sites as well.

Requirements

1) A really broad Internet Connection.
2) A Static IP
3) A High End Machine (if the site you are hosting is pretty static a lower end machine is sufficient to be more clear a dynamic personal blog kind of site will also never need more than 1000 Mb of RAM unless you are the Top blogger of the country)
4) Server Software (Apache preferred)
5) A Database Server (if needed, mysql/postgresql recommended)
6) Scripting Support (might be PHP. perl, python as per the requirements)

Using remote shells is all time favourite but remembering those many passwords is a pain so here are the steps to login using SSH without putting a password :)

1. Create a public ssh key, if you haven’t one already. Look at ~/.ssh. If you see a file named id_dsa.pub then you obviously already have a public key. If not, simply create one.

ssh-keygen -t dsa should do the trick. Please note that there are other types of keys, e.g. RSA instead of DSA.

2. Make sure your .ssh dir is not publically writable

    # chmod 700 ~/.ssh

Apache is the most common web server used now a days, you would have already configured apache many times by now but what about configuring it with SSL i.e. using apache to service on the https protocol, i assume you have already configured the basic apache server and have also enabled the SSL module, if not refer to my previous post on Configuring Apache Web server.

The following post is an extremely simplified step by step guide to configure SSL in apache using Self Signed Certificates you can also use a real certificate issued by a CA if you have it

Prerequisites

1) Apache with SSL module enabled
2) openssl installed

Step 1) Generate a Private Key

We will use the openssl toolkit for generating a RSA Private Key and Certificate Signing Request, as the first step generate the key the command below will create a 1024bit key using 3des