Setting up a Server on Cable Modem, How?

[mikepg]

I've been paying Yahoo $35 a month for their business Web hosting service. It has 50 email addresses at 2 gig's apiece and 2gb storage and a monthly transfer limit of 25gb.

What I want to do with the server is run some forums. Maybe a few personal webpage's or something(torrent tracking site??). I doubt bandwidth will be a big problem at first. My IP address has been the same for the last 8 months (actually since I had it installed).

Since I've been so lazy, I have been very slow in getting the pages up and running. I have 4 computers and am trying to figure out which to use as the server. I'll list them later and if anyone has suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated. I am pretty familiar with Windows 2003 Server. I think this is what I would like to start with since I'm familiar with it. In the future I would like to migrate to Linux.

Since I'm going to be purchasing the OS, which version should I get? Enterprise, Web edition, Data Center, or standard? Is it possible to have many domains running on the same server? Ex. www.AAAA.com, www.BBBB.com, www.CCCC.com etc. so they would be on one computer running a Windows 2003 Server (version?). Is this possible? Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[Osiris]

Personally, I dont think you could hold the bandwidth...when you start to get a lot of visitors, storage, etc...it might crash....maybe someone else has more experience on this than me...i was going to try it but was talked out of it for that very reason...im sure this site is hosted thru a major corp. not his own pc or isp.

 

[mikepg]

Would it be possible to have 2 cable modem's hooked up? 2 accounts?

 

[uzi9mm]

I have a cable connection

5500/360 and I am hosting my own forum, I am using Apache and YaBB.
I am using a dual p2 350's. with a 4.6gb 10k SCSI HD. Soon to be raided with another 4.6 drive.

Hosting websites are no problem. I had my piece of crap p1 120mhz run a website for about a month or two. You just need apache to do it. And a domain. You can get some cheap domains at around 3.99/year.

After you have your domain you need to have apache broadcast your site on port 80. (sometimes ISP's block outgoing port 80) so in that case you can redirect all trafic to port 8080 or something like that.

Now you go into your domain manager and select that you want a masked fowarding service. And just forward it to your IP.