How do I start ? (Total Newbie)

Hello Digital Ocean and Users,

Couple of days ago, I came to know about your service from a friend of mine. Since then I have been reading a lot on how to get started with you.

Before I place couple of my question, please note, I really have very little experience about unmanaged services. Through out my website service related life, I have been working with managed services, that too mainly with cPanel based hosting or VPS.

Presently, I require to move two domains, One running wordpress and another running CopperMine to you. But before that, I guess a lot of work needed for setup.

So the first question,

My primary source of visitors would be from India, so which server should I chose which theoretically has the best route from India ??

Secondly, please check (add or modify if needed) steps I have plan for deployment.

1. Setup via your getting started guide
2. Deploy Ubuntu x86 (i would be on 512MB Plan)
3. Deploy zPanel
4. I need a web based, (GUI) file manage… Like the one which comes with cPanel :P, please help on deploying one since it seems zPanel has none.
5. Setup DNS (please guide, on how to)
6. Point Domain (via NS given)
7. Setup email (i use a lot of email, so need SMTP / IMAP), please guide (provide a link may be ??) how do I get that running ??
8. How do I optimize and secure my server based on my desired operational layout ??
9. I need AWStats, how do i proceed ??

In short, I am very much used to cPanel, I checked their license fee, but it seems its not affordable by me, so not selecting, so I need to setup my server in a way which can come as close as to the operations of cPanel.

How do I proceed ??

I find a lot of tutorial, but missed few, so it would be just fine if you just mention what to do and give that link of that tutorial.

Urgent : I can’t start unless some one helps me finding the best possible server location for my visitor base, which is mainly Indian (along with many other 3rd world country where Indian manufactured products are exported, like latin america and Africa then EU and US)

Thanks…