Xampp, Friend or Foe?

I'll be the first to admit that I'm new to webhosting; I don't know much about LAMPs (Linux, apache, MySQL, + PHP). I've gone through the motions: reading books, websites, and asking "veterans" for help. During a last-effort attempt of trying to set up apache, I stumbled across a brilliant LAMP package called "XAMPP." From the site:

Many people know from their own experience that it's not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.

Well, I figured I had nothing to lose, so I installed it. Setup was a breeze, and I managed to set up Wordpress and phpBB3 forums in a matter of minutes. I went back to the website in search of available plugins, and instead found this little unnoticeable piece of text:

The philosophy behind XAMPP is to build an easy to install distribution for developers to get into the world of Apache. To make it convenient for developers XAMPP is configured with all features turned on.

The default configuration is not good from a securtiy point of view and it's not secure enough for a production environment - please don't use XAMPP in such environment.

The whole point of my downloading this software was based on the hopes of hosting several websites for development.

Anyhow, if one can use XAMPP for production (hosting sites on the internet) I would really like to know how. Until then, I'll just fiddle around with the security settings on the server in hopes of finding a way of making it more secure.