Just a heads up a LAMP stack on Ubuntu can be done in under an hour and half. I recently setup a LAMP stack and never setup a LAMP stack before in less than two hours.

I have some sys admin and nix experience. If I were you, unless you knew you wanted to learn how to setup and scale apps (sys admin), I'd go with webfaction

If you know how to setup a PHP/SQL development environment you may be able to setup a server. It's not that difficult.