I am going to be purchasing an unmanaged VPS very soon for a web application I’m working on, and I need some advice on some of the different things that I will have to install.

The goal here is to install as little as possible to reduce the system overhead of running multiple services. I am going to start with a base Ubuntu server install from scratch.

I know I will need:
- SSH (already provided)
- Apache 2
- MySQL 5
- PHP 5

Questions:
- SFTP - Will I need to run an SFTP/FTP service or does it use SSH alone?
- Sending mail - I will be using Google Apps to host all my mail so none will be incoming to the server, but I do need to be able to send email FROM the server. Do I need to install a mail service to do that or can the server just use an external SMTP or POP server to send mail with?

Also:
I won’t be running any kind of control panel on the server because it’s only going to be running one site, and I want to keep the overhead really low (entry-level VPS package limits are low already).

I would appreciate any input anyone can offer - this is my first step in an unmanaged hosting environment with full root access.