With the cheap prices of VPS hosting services these days, pretty much anyone can run his own server. Hosting your Drupal site on a VPS has a lot of advantages over running your site on shared hosting, but is a bit more difficult to get started. Using the following guide, you should be able to set up an Ubuntu Server on your VPS pretty easily. You'll install a full system with Apache, MySQL, SSH Server, PhpMyAdmin, ... We'll also configure the system with some minor tweaks that will cause a major performance boost over a barebones install.
Let's get started...