Install Apache Web Server

The Apache web server is currently the most popular web server in the world, which makes it a great default choice for hosting a website.

The Apache web server can be easily installed using Ubuntu's package manager, apt. A package manager allows us to install most software pain-free from a repository maintained by Ubuntu. For more about the apt, you can check here.

The Apache web server can be installed by typing these commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2

Since a sudo command is applied, these operations get executed with root privileges. It will ask you for your regular user's password to verify your intentions.

Afterwards, your web server is installed.

The default Apache Web server directory is /var/www/html/.

The default Apache Web access log is /var/log/apache/access.log or /var/log/apache2/access.log. If logs aren't there, try running locate access.log. You can run tail -f [log_file_name] command to se who is accessing the server.

Verify the Apache Web Server

You can do a spot check right away to verify that everything went as planned by visiting your server's public IP address in your web browser (To find your server's public IP, you can see here):

http://your_server_IP_address

You will see the default Ubuntu 14.04 Apache web page, which is there for informational and testing purposes. It should look something like this:

If you see this page, then your web server is now correctly installed.