so I'm new to linux and very new to servers. I installed LAMP on Ubuntu server edition (also have the gui version on top of that so i can use a web browser) using an online tutorial as a guide: found here. I got a domain from go daddy and with some more help on line got my domain name pointing at my ip. I can type my ip: 74.194.206.140, or my domain name: edubonzi.org, in the browser of my host computer and everything works fine. if one of my friends tries this they get some error message like "server timed out". i tried making my files public because i thought it may be some permission thing, i did this by editing the samba.conf file (more help from online). really wanting this to work out. any help would be awesome

If you have a router, you need to forward port 80 to your server.

i do not have a router

Do you use a modem?
So the server has the public IP?
Does your provider block ports?
Several providers don't allow the use of servers, and block ports (25,22,21,80...)

yes i have a cable modem i will check with my isp... but if so is there any way to get around that without buying a business plan from my isp?

Even if your ISP block port 80 you can use some facility call DMZ and NAT at your broadband router. Once you configured these then you can access your web from outside

Check the config files for your webserver (presumably, apache) and make sure your firewall is allowing connections on that port as well.

Surprised no one jumped on that - samba.conf, as the name implies, is the config file for samba, which is totally unrelated to this. You may want to undo whatever changes you made. Also, were this a permissions problem, your friends would be seeing 403s and 'Permission denied' pages; 'connection timed out' indicates that the TCP connection couldn't be established in the first place, meaning either apache isn't allowing it or something else (firewall, ISP, etc.) is blocking it and it never gets far enough for permissions to be relevant.