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".

A "server" is a particular software configuration. You can run a Linux server on a netbook. A Microsoft "server" is a particular license for a particular distro but their server distros actually make lower demands on hardware than their desktop distros. I've run Server 2008 in a VM with acceptable performance.

I would suggest that if you want to go the Linux route, any old plain vanilla hardware you like the look of will do just fine. If you're going to expand to meet increasing requirements, go for hosting (virtual hosting, colo, etc). It's less work and you get more bang for your buck.

I have one like this: Intel Atom 330 Mini ITX with PicoPSU

I've configured it with Windows Home Server which is cheap (OEM), and allows a lot of fancy things. it's a full win2003 based server, that allows easy backup of up to 10 systems, file sharing and user managing in the network, _very_ easy storage management/expansion. and it has a full iis on it, to host your own webpage-work, if you want to.

of course, you can just try out the software, and of course, you can run it on something else.

the nice thing about the ebay link above: it's completely silent. yes it has fans, no, i haven't plugged them in anymore :) it runs 24/7 without any problem :)