I work with a LAMP stack, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP and now Python and Ruby On Rails too.  This kind of environment  powers hundreds of millions of web sites on the internet every day.  Its proven to be reliable and very efficient at serving web pages.

For version control I LOVE git and Github.com.  Github.com is essentially a social network for coders but instead of swapping pictures and stories we swap code.  I have also have experience using Subversion for version control.

Ubuntu is my distro of choice and I can take a bare bones VPS and turn into a secure web hosting environment in no time.