Ask HN: How do you configure personal server?

Hello! Long-time HN lurker joining for the first time. I'm wondering what suggestions people have for configuring a personal server; I run a couple WordPress sites on a small VPS and am looking to add a Mailman install and probably a Rails app or two soon.

The whole Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Docker world is a little new to me, so I'm trying to figure that out and don't know if that should be part of my solution. Ideally, I'd like to be able to recreate this entire server if anything ever happens to it, restore my database and file backups, and be done. I want the software configuration (nginx, MySQL, Postgres, etc.) to be "nice."

Any advice is much appreciated.