I am more interested in the design of the code (i.e functional design vs object oriented design). What are the best practices and what is the communities thoughts on this subject?
Not that it should matter, but I am working with Apache and Python technology stack.
If you are using Apache+Python, this sounds like you are using Python for dynamic web pages. In that case, I would strongly urge you to look into Django. There are also other Python web development environments, but Django is perhaps the most popular; and it has excellent documentation such as The Django Book. The Django Book describes best practices for setting up a robust web site: how to use multiple servers for redundancy, how to set up the database server, how to set up a cache to reduce the load on your database, etc.
Other than that tip, good Python server-side code would be just good Python code. There was a question asked recently about how to become a good Python developer, and I would suggest you read that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1507041/how-do-i-get-fluent-in-pythonic/1507101#1507101