A good server.

We are running a Comaq 1600 R (500MHz) with 512 megs of RAM, a Mylex RAID card and 6 9gig SCSI drives. Its old but it is reliable.

We use a RedHat variant called e-smith www.e-smith.org
which provides you with the web server, Apache, e-mail,
q-mail, webmail ftp SAMBA and has a nice web interface for a newbie to manage the thing.

We use 2 white box P2's 350 MHz as name servers, RedHat 9.0.

We have 8 IP numbers. (you have to get the numbers to register your name servers)

We use a old Cisco switch.

In other words if this is for yourself, you can start with very little. Get your feet wet and then get that big IBM mainframe to blow away everyone else.