Serious issues with changing PHP upload limit

I feel stupid bringing this topic to the table again, since it has been posted many times, but no solution has worked thus far and I’ve been trying for days. I made a WordPress site for an English project. I have setup a self hosted server on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and installed LAMP as directed. Everything in WordPress is fantastic and I’ve only had this one major issue. I simply can’t increase the max upload size for media.

I have tried editing the php.ini files in the system at all of these locations:
/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
/etc/php5/cli/php.ini
/var/www/html/php.ini (this is my WordPress root)

This all failed to change anything.

I then tried using a plugin which created a php5.ini file at:
/var/www/html/php5.ini

This also failed.

My last attempt was to create a .htaccess file at:
/var/www/html/.htaccess

This had absolutely no effect either.

To be clear, I have restarted apache after editing these php.ini files and seen no result. I have even restarted the server to no avail. Any help is appreciated!