This HowTo will describe the setup of an efficient http server and mail server for small or medium configurations (as low as 96 mb). So this config is ideal for a small VPS. You can find a good choice of cheap and performant VPS (XEN) at x|encon, a german hosting company. they provide many scalable VPS solutions with pre-installed Debian and Ubuntu disc images.

They have it broken out into five overarching steps for getting things working, but there's lots of little sub-steps you'll need to work through to get it up and running. Thankfully, most of the hard part (installing the packages) is handled through the apt-get command and you won't be required to compile.