Hi all, I've been googling as much as I can, and I can't find an answer nor a better place to put this question, so I hope it's not too off base.

I am looking to set up a home web server, and would prefer to set it up with linux. All it would be used for is hosting a simple page, probably either php or .net/c#, possibly with a blog, forum, etc. I'm not expecting much traffic or anything.

I have a few priorities here -
1) Fast/stable enough to run all those relatively simple things.
2) Possibly able to have a raid 1 setup.
3) Quiet and low power consumption (these would be very nice to have, but aren't necessarily deciding factors)
4) Cheap. If all the other requirements are met, cheapness will be a factor, since I won't be using it for much else.

If anyone has any advice, I would be very grateful. Currently, I'm looking at a few things. Ebay seems to have plenty of used machines for very cheap (I'm thinking I could get something which has more than enough power for ~$50). Other than that, I've considered buying something new from newegg, but that jumps my pricetag up to at least $200, and if I don't have to spend that money I'd rather not. I'm not ruling it out though, coming into this, I figured I'd have to spend at least a couple hundred. If spending $300 meant filling all my needs amazingly, I would definitely consider it, though it seems like I can probably squeak by under that.

Thanks in advance for any help you guys can offer.

I'd say don't bother. Use shared hosting or a VPS service instead. No bandwidth or power hassles, much simpler, and if you're buying from scratch, much cheaper too.

Hmm. I'll look a bit more into those options but I'm not so sure about that. I do prefer having the control of just owning the box myself, in case I want to do anything else with it down the line, scheduled tasks, services, logging, and all that. I could probably get similar functionality out of a VPS, but they don't seem too cheap... Keeping my own setup also means that I can always play around with new technologies instead of wondering when a provider will support them (if ever).

The problem with doing it yourself is your bandwidth. What if your pages suddenly become really popular all of a sudden?

If your on ADSL, then your up-speed is going to be a small fraction of your down speeed.

Apart from that, get a second hand Intel Mac Mini and install Linux on it. I wouldn't worry about the RAID stuff, it's not like it's going to increase the performance of your web site when combined with the other factors involved. Just take an image of the hard disk so that you can dump it back on if the worst happens.

Well the plan with the Raid setup was to have redundancy and not have to worry about taking backups, rather than to have a performance increase.

I'm on cable. I don't really ever plan on this "taking off", it is mostly just a site for me and my friends. If bandwidth ever actually becomes a problem, I could just figure it out when it happens.

I'll check out the mac mini and see what kind of pricing I can get on that.