Plesk Server Management vs Others

Hey guys, I was looking for a new webmaster community and ran by this site a few months ago, so far the search has been a god-send to me but this time I really don't think I can find an answer on my own.

A few weeks ago I was just going through my usual fill of websites, news, etc. I decided to check my domains to see which needed renewals and if there was anything new I should know of. Most of mine are at go daddy and when I logged in they were running ads for Virtual Dedicated Servers for something like, 30-50USD. And on top of your BW and space you can pay a little fee and get the PLesk software. So I kinda thought this would be a fun little learning box, hell $30 is chump change if I can turn this into something that can make me $50 down the road. I signed up, a few days later my server was up and running.

After a few days of fondling the DNS settings I managed to get all name servers and domains working successfully (mind you my sendmail hasn't been working since day one... but let me say that I haven't even had time to start taking a look at even setting that up).

So now I'm kind of at the point where I want to start migrating some of my smaller sites to this box just to see how it handles the stress and everything. But before I start sending traffic to this server I want to add atleast a firewall or some kinds of security measures, set-up a good bash environment so I can do more with the server later on via SSH.

After all security concerns I want to move onto setting up the servers components such as apache, php, etc.. as if I had it hosted on a regular virtual host.

I need to know where I could find common settings for these components that would be in use, php.php, htaccess defaults, etc.. Generally common listings of settings that would be found on your everyday virtual host. And how to go about setting all that up.

So if you guys could give me some links to the manuals or even the books and courses you've taken, I'd love it. It doesn't necessarily have to be about plesk, just general server maintanence.

Come to think of it, if you guys even know of or have experience with any other server management software please, do tell.

Thanks.