Since this is my first post, so I would like to write something for WordPress.
First, I assume you have an ubuntu 14.04 on your vps.
Then under the guideline in Initial Server Setup with Ubuntu 14.04 and then the guideline in How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack on Ubuntu 14.04 and then How To Install Wordpress on Ubuntu 14.04.
Quite easy right?
But you may find that you cannot update or download things on WordPress.
So second you need to change the permission of your web server:
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data your-wordpress-directory
and then you can do anything you want on WordPress!
However, your friends might complain that they cannot receive the registration email from your blog. The reason is that you do not set the mail server on your VPS.
Here is an easy way for you to send registration emails from your VPS without doing some tedious things if you just want your WordPress can send out emails.
Just Go To Plugins and add a SMTP setting plugin. QUITE EASY RIGHT?
For the recommendation, I use Configure SMTP right now.
P.S. if you do not want the link of the WordPress be directly your IP, then you can create sub-folder under the initial folder (for me it is /var/www/html)