What are some things I can do?
That's really outside the scope of this forum.
I've been running my own websites for 5 years now, and I'm still learning new things everyday. I haven't found a good one stop site that will give you step by step instructions, there are some books though. The difficulty lies in all the different ways you can configure your web server, Windows, Linux or BSD, Apache, MySQL and PHP versions, and of course the different apps you decide to put up.
All I can say is before you open up your computer to the world, do some reading, start locking down the Operating System and work from there.