Maybe I am just a confused newbie, but I think the requirements for this tutorial might be either unclear or missing a critical element.
It says that you’ll need “Ubuntu Server” and “Secure Shell (SSH) access to your server”. By default, Ubuntu Server does not have a graphical desktop (Gnome/KDE/etc.). And the tutorial tells us that “we can test [our progress] by typing in our IP address for the web server” and displaying a web page and later we have a screenshot from a GUI web browser. That implies we are using a graphical. So the scenario is that we have a desktop PC connecting (over SSH) to a ‘headless’ server doing the webhosting. That’s exactly my scenario and the right one for this tutorial.
Near the end of the tutorial , we are told that the ServerName is gci.example.com and that should measure success by reaching gci.example.com from the desktop PC. But obviously I don’t control example.com. How does my deskop PC know that gci.example.com should resolve to my new webserver?? There is nothing here about setting up DNS or about changing anything (the hosts file??) on the user’s desktop PC to point gci.example.com to our newly-created server. So even if someone follows these instructions, surely they are bound to fail?
It seems like there is a hidden requirement to control a domain name.
One way to solve this is a step explaining how to set up the desktop PC for the test. Another way would be to have an explicit requirement that you control a domain name, but I worry this leads to a chicken-and-egg situation where scenarios for setting up a domain name might reasonably assume that you already have a web server set up.
Or perhaps it would be possible to re-write the tutorial to use only the IP address? And split the subdomain part off into another tutorial.