I'm a big believer of reducing maintenance. One of the things that I didn't bother setting up before but should've is *unattended upgrades*. The benefits of this is that you don't have to repeatedly log into your sever to upgrade your system.
Why bother managing your own server in the first place? Well with a virtualized system you can set up any type of application that you like. You're not limited to only hosting static sites or whatever applications the C-Panel instance allows.
Now there's no need for me to reiterate what's been done before, so here's a [useful post from libre-software](https://libre-software.net/ubuntu-automatic-updates/) describing how to set it up so that a Ubuntu server updates itself automatically.
