I'm setting up a small web server and mail server to screw around with. It'll be on a dedicated or VPS.

I've tinkered with these quite a few times in the past but overall it seems like there are at least a dozen ways to carve things up. E.g. where to put the htdocs, whether to make the users homedir dump them straight into htdocs, etc.

Googling around for setting up web sites finds a lot of rudimentary web site building but not much beyond the basics.

So... what's your preferred layout for setting up different virtual directories, or virtual sites? And granting (or not granting) shell access to a few other friends to tinker with their own web sites?

I wouldn't have user accounts on a web server, and I certainly wouldn't make their home directory htdocs, unless you want all of them mucking about with your website.

I use CentOS, and instead of htdocs being my web root directory, /var/www/html is where all my "stuff" goes.

Beneath the web root directory, for a small website, I would probably only have two subdirectories: docs and images. In docs I'd place .PDF files and the like. In images I'd put all my images - logos, photographs, bits of images needed for CSS, and so forth.

Some folks like having a css directory with assorted CSS files in it, but I put all of my CSS into one monster file in the root directory (web root - htdocs for you, /var/www/html for me) and load it once and be done with it.

You could also make subdirectories for the major areas of your website. For example, if your website is about pets, you might have subdirectories for dogs, cats, fish, birds, reptiles. Inside each of those subdirectories you could put an index.htm (or index.html or index.php or similar) file, so that visitors to your website would just need to type in "http://my.website/dogs" to get to the section about dogs.

OR if your website is small enough that you only need one page for dogs, don't bother with the subdirectories, and let your users browse to http://my.website/dogs.html or similar. Even if there are 2 or 3 sub-pages to the dogs page, you could leave everything in htdocs and call the pages dogs.html, dog_breeds.html, dog_diet.html, dog_grooming.html and so on.

Basically you just need to think about what you want to accomplish with your site, and what is the most logical and easy to maintain way to go about it. Whatever you decide on, BE CONSISTENT. Otherwise you're getting yourself into a maintenance nightmare on down the road.

i usually move the 'document root' of my virtual server into the home directory of my limited user account (leaving the default server at /var/www(/html) is fine), this makes it easier to upload files to the site via FTP, especially on a machine to which you have no physical access.

That's a good approach. I go about it backwards - I make my limited user account have 'document root' as his home directory. He can FTP to it, but not ssh. And it's only the one account.

I re-read the original question and the OP said this is just to screw around with, and the accounts are for friends... so with a server like that I would be more lenient. I'd also be prepared to restore from backup or reinstall if things get horribly mangled

that would work with ONE user, by moving the limited account's home to the 'document' root, then everyone has permission to edit everyone else's stuff (one shared account?)

whereas putting document root(s) in user(s) home directory(ies)
(yes each virtual server can have it's own document root in a separate user's home directory), it prevents the users from accessing each other's stuff, and allows ssh and separate ftp logins.