A lot of people remove the passphrase from their own key files because it is the simplest solution, but security-wise, it is not the best idea.
An alternative is to feed the passphrase to Apache.
If you only have one SSL site on your server, the simplest form of this would be:
# either of these will work SSLPassPhraseDialog |/path/to/passphrase-script SSLPassPhraseDialog exec:/path/to/passphrase-script
Then create a very simple script called /path/to/passphrase-script that contains something like the following:
#!/bin/sh echo "put the passphrase here"
WARNING: As this script would contain the actual passphrase, it needs to be securely locked-down.
NOTE: When starting up, Apache will take the output of this script and use it as the passphrase for the SSL key.