Are you reasonably comfortable with SSH and the shell Mighty? Please post questions here and I'll be happy to assist.
Are you having someone else host dns? That would be the optimal solution, so that you set DNS to point at your box and then you're good to go. That's how my rigs work - whomever I purchase the domain from handles DNS pointing to my servers. Then it's a pretty simple process to add sites. Really simple in fact. Here's a sketch (ask questions about which of these are confusing):
Set up httpd.conf to listen for named virtual hosts on your IP.
Set up httpd.conf to include anything in a directory where you'll keep individual files for each website. On my server, everything is /usr/local/apache2/conf/sitefiles.
I tell httpd.conf to include everything with a .inc suffix. So I can shut sites down by simply renaming them to (same site name).site or whatever and they won't get included in the next restart of Apache.
Create yourself 3 little scripts to start, stop and cycle apache. These will come in great handy. Personally I use apstart, apstop and apcycle. The apcycle script is simply:
/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -k graceful
which reloads Apache gracefully. I put these scripts in /usr/local/sbin.
Then you'll need virtual host files for your sites. An example might look like this:
<VirtualHost 216.19.223.41:80>
ServerName www.mydomain.com
ServerAlias wickedsignals.com
DocumentRoot /www/sites/mydomain
</VirtualHost>
A more advanced one (including rewrites and SSL) might look like this:
<VirtualHost 216.19.223.41:443>
ServerName controlcenter.mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /www/sites/mydomain/cc
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /usr/local/apache2/conf/ssl.crt/www.mydomain.org.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /usr/local/apache2/conf/ssl.key/www.mydomain.org.key
Alias /javascript /www/sites/mydomain/cc/javascript
Alias /posters /www/sites/mydomain/storage/posters
Alias /trailers /www/sites/mydomain/storage/trailers
RewriteEngine on
# If it's a resource hit (graphics etc) then succeed and end rewriting...
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /graphics [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /posters [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /trailers [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /javascript
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /favicon
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /graphics/favicon.ico [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /main.php?%{REQUEST_URI}
</VirtualHost>
Note that you can have both of these definitions in a single file. So I tend to put everything related to (a certain domain) in a single file, called, cleverly, (that domain).inc.
After you've created/edited/deleted your include files, issue an apcycle from the command line and you're up.
Hope this kicks you off in the right direction.
