Step 1. Choose a distro. For servers Centos (a Redhat Enterprise Linux rebuild) or Debian would be a good choice due to their long support cycles. However Mandriva, Suse, Ubuntu, Slackware even Gentoo (if you like their idea of building everything from source) or any other Linux distro would also do alirght.
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I would like to move onto a linux platform but am unsure how to go about this with minamal downtime of Webserver and Mail Server
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Setup Linux on a test machine. You'd never be able to just wipe Windows and install Linux and setup all those services with minimal downtime no matter how much you knew about Linux. Once you've got your test machine setup with those same services and running well then you can plan to switch over.
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I would also like to have a way of making the server text my mobile every couple of hours as in some type of snmp so I know if the server is up or down
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Sign up with an SMS gateway provider (there'll plenty around in whatever country you're from). Make sure they allow you to trigger an sms by sending an email to a particular gateway. Now you can easily use the mail command and cron to have it mail you every so often.
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also will need to run web alazyer the stat counter thing you can get built into apache and i will need to set up SSL
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Apache is native to Linux as well so it should work the same as on Windows for you. There are plenty of good open source web stats programs - eg. awstats - just google around.
Search around for HOWTOs and stuff like that and give it all a try on a test machine. When you get stuck on something post on this site with a specific question. Asking 'how do I setup all this stuff' is a bit too general and its covered by HOWTOs anyway
