Well Sneaky, you'll be happy to hear I have signed up and got my first droplet going (Ubuntu 14.04 x64). They have a ton of tutorials and help pages which is great because I'm a huge noob.
So I have a LAMP stack running. I initially tried to install everything manually, but quickly realized I was in way over my head. Kept getting issues when trying to install Apache about not having APR or whatever, even though I had gotten the APR stuff via wget and unzipped/unpacked (are those terms interchangeable in Linux?) via tar xvf (if I remember correctly). Anyway, I looked online for a tutorial on how to do it manually and basically the consensus was to not do that and instead just use apt-get. Which is fine but I would have liked to learn how to do it manually because I am sure I'd learn a lot. Plus I installed my WAMP stack manually (I have never used XAMPP), and because of that I know way more about Apache, PHP, and MySQL configuration than any of my coworkers because they do it via XAMPP.
Anyway, so I undid basically everything I did, which wasn't much because I didn't get very far. I installed everything via apt-get. Kinda disappointed though that the version of PHP is 5.5.9. That's kinda old in my opinion. In any case I'll revisit it at a later date or something and see if I can figure out how to do it manually, because I'd love to use PHP7 when it's released in October.
I created my PHP error log and put it inside the /var/www/ directory, so it's not accessible publicly. What's the best practices for its permissions? I only had a few minutes to experiment with it before I had to return to work but was only able to get PHP to write errors to it with 777 permissions, which I assume are way too high. One thing I saw online was to check which user is running Apache, though I don't know how to do that.
This is the book I picked up on the weekend. Should be getting into it tonight. Fun times ahead!
EDIT: Also when I was using root before I created my new user, I was able to do something like this:
echo "Hello world!" > index.html
But when I tried to do it via my new user, even with sudo, I would get a permission denied error message. Instead I had to do:
sudo touch index.html
sudo nano index.html
And then add in the content. Is there a reason for that?