Fedora or CentOS are good RedHat-based distributions of Linux, but I still prefer Debian for everyone (noob to master). It provides arguably the best package system for Linux, is EXTREMELY stable (the maintainers are downright anal about packages before they make it into the stable tree), but does allow someone who's daring to run testing or unstable versions (nonclemature, unstable is usually quite stable) of the distro.

And upgrades are easy - apt-get dist-upgrade.

I am thinking of going with Debian. On the site it says if i want to download 650MB files or 4.4GB files. So i click on 4.4 i386. Do i have to download all of thoes files? It adds up to around 16GB's!

If you plan on having a network connection throughout, consider using the netinst ISO image - it is ~160MB, and contains only the base system and packages. The rest will be downloaded from a mirror via apt-get during install.

Ok I was thinking of that also. Thanks.

Debian is another nice distro to use. My experiences with CentOS have been disappointing the more I use it. (I've got a number of servers with the exact same config files that behave differently)

However, with the help of cluberti and jcarle, I've got a Debian webserver up and running on a Hyper-V VM. It's currently hosting www.jcarle.com and www.zxian.org (DNS, MySQL, Apache, and FTP).

I used this guide as a starting point to figure out what to install. However, I decided against using ISPconfig in the end since it's mostly a private server and I'd rather do the minor edits here and there myself.

Thanks again Zxian.

There are two things Im wondering. One, when I come to the domain name part, do I have to put in the domain that I bought (going to buy)?

Two, how should I partition my drive? When I was reading the FREEBSD guide, there was something of the amount of ram and disc space (I think, cant remember exactly). If you need my specs for the server, here they are.

Hard drive: 320GB's

RAM: 2GB's

CPU: dual core 1.8GHz

Honestly, for a hosting server, I'd just take the default of let the system decide for you on partitioning. As to the domain name, it's not required that you enter the name of the domain you bought, but it isn't a bad idea to do.

What about if im hosting forums? And thanks for helping me.

Honestly, unless it's a BIG forum, you don't need a lot more disk speed than you'll get with those drives just yet.

Ok, thanks.