Will Monte I think if you went hosted, a lot of these small things that add up to big issues would go away. 

This process of creating should at least be kind of fun, not so stressful. I'll help too man.

I am hosted with TMD and they are awesome. I have one of their VPS packages. You can autoinstall UNA from their cpanel.  Also mine actually autoupdate from TMD. All good so far.

I had good luck with TMDhosting, and good luck it is, because any server is just as good as the people running it, which means that if there is a change of staff or of the CEO, that same very best server can convert into the very worse. It happened to me at Arvixe and even for a while with Zarconia some time back (when Nathan disappeared). Who knows? May be that he transitted to some other universe where the stress factor is nil.

Never rely on any server backing up your site on a daily basis, because if something happens by an act of God or man, that guarantee will go up in smoke before your very eyes.

I learnt the hard way to back up once a week or biweekly or monthly and doing so with an ethernet cable directly to the router. Once I did a backup by wifi and regretted it as the packages in the zip file were corrupt and were invalid because of faulty transmission causing skips.

Point is: Don't be lazy! Have confidence in automation but always fall back to the good ole manual backup every once in a while.