Linux?
FreeBSD?
Windows2003?
Other
I heared thad FreeBsd is the best

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It strongly depends on a variety of factors!!!!!1!11!eleven

These factors correlate directly with your goals and restrictions.

Well! The! first! thing! you! need! to! do! is ! to!... gosh that's tiresome.

Asking for "the best" anything is asking for a very subjective set of opinions. "The best" way to do a thread like this is for you to tell us:

• what hardware you plan to run it on
• what the server is going to be doing? Webserver? File server? something else?
• what you currently use and why is that not suitable for you any more
• any research you have already done and any conclusions you have already reached

web/ftp server
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Other.

Just to be confusing.

Your post is very sweat.
And I agree to robbbert and XavierP
use Windows 2003

If you continue with questions and answers like that, people will keep mocking you (see above).

You need to answer xavierps post about your requirements, then people will be able to give you their opinions, you'll choose the one mentioned the most as long as someone says it is easy to install and setup, and then it'll be done, like the millions of other posts.

P.S please put your add your signature via the profile page, adding it at the end of your post means it'll showup when quoting you, and you'll have to type it everytime :S

Regarding the Signature the example.
I've quote my last post.
I don't want to blame you. So the best is to tell us what XavierP asked you.
And then we can give you a hint and if you engage in problems then come back and we all try to help you again.
As far as I remember we are here in LQ Forum and that why I would never recommend Windows... see my signature.

What server OS depends on a couple of things. What you want to do with the server? What software you are going to run on the software?

I would use Apache / and vsftpd running on a linux server. If you are running import peoples sites and need security. If you are running a server for one site then you could use Windows 2003 with apache and open source ftp.

Freebsd is a wonderful operating system. It is used by many ISP's, including my own. One of my home machines is Freebsd 6.1. Nonetheless, unless you are familiar with the intricacies of Unix, I would think it would be easier, and probably just are secure to stick with a Linux machine. You will find a large user base willing to help you whenever you run into problems.

I'll suggest linux as linux is what i am using in..

From one newbie (to another?)... Linux is great and inexpensive for file sharing, ftp, and webserver. In my opinion it became a bit painful for a mail server so I went to hosted mail. For file sharing you really can't beat it. I run Fedora Core with Samba as a PDC to handle permissions of my Windows xp workstations. It gives so much flexibility with the NASs I use for backup. I am able to schedule pretty much any kind of backup I want. I use SSH to manage the file server from home with no problems. I tried Windows servers and the biggest advantage Fedora has is that you set it up and it just runs. I haven't ever had to reboot. My windows servers would give me big problems after updates.

I used Slackware as my webserver for quite sometime. Since then though, I have been dabbling in BSD and have found NetBSD much nicer to manage.

I guess the jump from Windows -> *BSD would be a little bigger then Windows -> Linux.

That said, take nothing away from Slackware, it's been my choice distro for many years

-Kristijan