A few months ago, I decided to switch from shared hosting to a VPS based setup. This has much more flexibility, but requires a bit (read: a lot) more work to get things going. Three months later and I have deployed a number of services on it that were just not possible in a typical shared hosting environment (email, ownCloud and Gogs to name a few). Sometimes this was fairly straightforward to set-up, but other times it took more than a few hours. Below is a list of useful resources I used to get everything going.

Debian Specific

HTTP server

PHP

Mail

Security

Bells and Whistles