OK, this is a good plan in theory, however there are scarce few ISP providers who will allow a webserver to be run off of a residential internet connection. If you want it to be just in an internal network, like on a couple interconnected machines in your home, then that's cool. But you may need to do a little bit of fancy footwork, and possibly be in violation of the terms of service of your internet connection provider, if you run a webserver from your home... Just something to be aware of, for your own peace of mind
It still comes back to LOTS of READING though, whatever you end up doing. One must walk before one runs, as the old stale cliche goes, and likewise, one should learn Linux (to some degree) before learning Apache on Linux.
Again though, in the interest of education, we will try to help where we can.

Best of luck with your project!

it says the connection was refused when attempting to cantact localhost.

First off Redhat 9 is very old, out of date and no longer supported. I would try Fedora if you want to stay with something similar to Redhat.

Second, here is the old RH http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/
Check out.
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...ide/index.html
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l.../custom-guide/

It will tell you how to start the httpd service via the graphical configuration tool or by command line. By command line (need to be root user)
service httpd start

hi,
um just so you know you dont need to have a web server running linux it can be just running windows or you could even run the webserver on your own computerthat you use for every day stuff. you would still need to proberly install apache (not quite sure)but it would proberly be a lot simpler for the time being then after you done it on a windows machine and had futher practice at just using linux then may be starting hosting on a linux machine.

just an idea any way you might find it more simpler

good luck