Obviously, this will be a bit of a "how long is a piece of string?" question, but ideas are welcome.

I came to Linode on a 360 because I wanted to look at Elgg and it does not run with php in fastcgi and some other reasons. I ended up with Debian Etch, Apache, Mysql and Php - Etch upgraded to Lenny when it came out.

I thought I wanted to create a community and have now decided I don't - so basically would be looking at just running Drupal (perhaps with something else, knowing I cannot keep my sticky fingers off playing with something).

I do not pretend to know or want to know too much about the server side of things, but read about Nginx running as a proxy with Apache and all sorts.

So, if you just wanted to run, say, Drupal and probably go back to making some areas just html and php pages by hand, what would be your ideal server set-up?

I hope this question is not too dumb, but last time I just did it, so this time I thought it would be better to ask.

My vote is for Lenny on a Linode 360. Piece o' cake. Unless Drupal is an enormous memory hog, which it may be, I have no personal experience.

360 should be sufficient. Just make sure not to have your max clients set too high if use apache.

edit: oops didn't realize how old this was.

4 hours?

You should definitely try out a http server other than Apache. Either lighttpd or nginx. Check out these benchmarks:

http://buytaert.net/drupal-webserver-co ... s-compared

I went with lighttpd due to better documentation (or at least I think it has better documentation). It's very easy to set up and very light on resources. Feel free to ask for help on setting it up if you want to.