Hey all, I've been wanting to buy my own server that I can keep in the corner, next to the router. Before I started looking for one, I'd thought I'd ask the experts. What I want to get is something that I can play around on, and learn from. Where I can host my own website, just for experimenting with PHP, and running a server myself (even just using http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/blah.html (with the x's my IP address). Something I can use to store my code (via some concurrent system) so I can easily access my code (I live at 2 houses). Mainly its just for me to learn from. So what do I buy? I wanted to get something compact, inexpensive, and not too hot (the room's not A/C'd). Its just for personal use, but I'd like to be able to expand it later on, depending on what I fancy later. I've heard that I can just use an old PC and load up a distro of Linux (oh, and for OS, I'd want some form of Linux, I guess). But if I was to buy something, what specs would I need? Is there any models that are compact? I don't want a PC tower sitting under the phone, its too bulky. I guess I'm asking, what should I look for? What specs or keywords should I look into? What should I google for? Cheers, Dan

Personally, I just have a standard tower running XP as a server. It doesn't need to be anything fancy, and you could probably get away with something fairly horrible like a 486 with 64MB of RAM if you really wanted to.
Linux is a reasonable option and is often more lightweight, but if you're not familiar with Linux, using a Windows based PC makes more sense to start with at least.

As far as things you can run on it, my server runs Apache for HTTP/PHP, MySQL for a database, FileZilla Server for FTP, and Perforce for source control. All of which are free.
Plus, since it's just XP, I can use it as another PC for gaming (Although it's not really that high spec) or anything else you'd use a desktop for.

As far as cases go, I can't really say. I've just got a standard tower case, which is an "Arctic cooling silentium T1".