Are you planning to host your own simple static private website ?
or are you planning to use the hardware as a file server ?
In both cases you don't need a complete LAMP stack.
Linux ? yes
Apache ? no
MySQL ? no
PHP ? no
As a file server:
Install ubuntu-server and only activate "sshd".
That is all. You can access the fileserver now from any platform
(Linux, Apple OSX, OpenSolaris, BSD, Dragonfly etc etc etc)
In case you are condemned to need access from the only non standards-compliant OS (MS-Windows)
then don't immediately install samba on linux: It is IMHO better to install WinSCP on windows (or FileZilla if that is more to your liking)
Why ? Samba is resonably complex , a bit of a hassle to set up correctly and a reliable source of version dependent incompatibilities (just like in windows) And why should everyone bow to the bidding of the only player in the field that refuses to play along with the rest ? so keep it stupidly simple (KISS) and use something that is simple, highly secure and native to the system, widely supported on all (but one) platforms and always works reliably.
If you want to use the server as a http/https server, just install lighttpd from the repositories.
See here for a swift and reasonable comparison between webservers.
Another thing: Don't install a desktop/GUI-system on your server because it brings the average uptime from 10 years down to possibly less than a month (besides the massive resources that GUIs eat for breakfast)