ThePurpleK

@Heisenberg - Have you considered other platforms such as Jekyll? This way, you won't need to worry about security as much as Wordpress. For example, looking through a few sites linked here, I can already see potential problems and plugins. For example, Divi Builder had a security vulnerability allowing arbitrary files to be downloaded. Having the /wp-admin/ unchanged makes it perfect for an automated scanner to execute the exploit. However, the sites people have linked to here are up to date with plugins, but imagine if a zero-day that can be automatically executed. Wordpress is a PITA to manage in terms of security and security plugins won't help because it'll always end up being a plugin you've installed having a zero-day vulnerability that you aren't aware of until it's too late.

Yoda conditions I've seen before. They're awesome, especially for PHP and other C-style languages where accidentally dropping off a comparison operator can be an issue. For example: if (x = 3) { will work, whereas: if (3 = x) { will result in an error. Truly lifesaving.

I disagree with LowEndBox. The companies which advertise there are too small to give you security of your data, keep your servers up and give you decent support. Low end VPS hosting is a really competitive market so companies on LEB always die out. You'd rather go with DigitalOcean.

I haven't touched shared hosting in a long time. Too many issues. It would actually be cheaper to get a $10 VPS from DigitalOcean. It's definitely worth learning how to deploy websites on Linux.

I've heard good things about OpenVBX (OpenVBX: the Web-based, Open Source Phone System for Business) outside of the education sector. Maybe it's worth taking a look?

By the way, have you considered learning PHP via a more practical route? PHP has advanced so much in the past few years, that I'd actually recommend you skip learning plain PHP (which causes you to easily pick up bad coding practices and implement poor security) and learn Laravel instead. It's very beginner friendly, and if you have learnt enough to understand PHP's syntax, Laravel will be a godsend to you. I heavily recommend Team Treehouse for learning PHP (or any programming language/framework, for that matter) and Laracasts for Laravel (Jeffrey Way can teach anybody just about anything in his videos!).

You'd much prefer using DigitalOcean for hosting small projects, but if you want a home server just as a hobby, set up a server with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and set up an appropriate stack for your applications. For website hosting, I'd recommend nginx, with your domain placed behind CloudFlare to mitigate threats your existing setup might miss. If you have a dynamic IP address, get DynDNS.