I am a complete newbie and I know nothing about managing VPS, I purchased one last night in emergency to get my blog back up and running after the suspension from other host. I managed to install Apache/Php/MySQL and my domain after reading tutorials online. Everything was fine the site is up but my blog is consuming 98% (around 510 MB) of my 512 MB memory. My site is damn slow and it is not working the way I wanted. I need somone who is good with this sort of stuffs and who can help me in optimizing my server/site's performance. I am not asking for free help. I will reward you with 30$ via paypal if everything goes right. PM me for more details. Trusted users only.
Just install a controlpanel. Something lightweight like LxCenters Kloxo (www.lxcenter.org). This will also install a webhosting stack and have most figured out. What you need to focus on, is getting the VPS hardened and secured which should also include a good backup plan. Perhaps get yourself some servermanagement on a monthly basis.