Buying a Server

I have been having problems with my website hosting company. I host 11 websites with hostonce.com and twice now all of these sites have been down for a couple days at a time, and the site for the company was down at the same time as well, so there was no way to submit a support ticket. After this happened the second time I decided I had to find a new hosting company. I wanted to be able to host all of my websites on one account with room to grow. I have 3 different accounts with hostonce since they offer a deal where you can upgrade to a 5 site host for 45 dollars above the 80 something price of one site. This was a good enough deal at first since I had locked in a yearly rate of 60 odd dollars plus the 45 for my first set of 5 sites, but over time it has proven to be a bit of a pain.

I looked into getting a dedicated server hosted for me, or ever a Virtual Private Server. The dedicated server setup would have cost over $4000 dollars a year, more than I can afford, and the VPS solution I found would have limited me to 30 websites and cost over $800 dollars a year.

Looking at those prices I began to wonder what it would cost to host my own webserver.
AT&T recently raised the price I was paying for internet from around $35 dollars a month to around $55 becuase we lost a discount we were getting.
Cox business internet service offers a plan with a dedicated IP and an OPEN port 80 for website hosting for $69 dollars a month. Not that much more than AT&T.
Dell offers a varity of servers for different price ranges. I found and ordered a very basic one on sale with a dual core 2.0ghz processor, two 80 gig hard drives, and 2gig of ram for $423.08 with taxes and Shipping. It should arrive next week.

Now I need to save up for the software to put on my server. Windows Web Server 2008 $469 Web Server-only product, no CALs required. Available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Fortunatly there is a 60 day downloadable trial version of this software (which I am downloading right now) so I can install and setup my software now and pay for it next month.

Fun, Fun, Fun, I have a new toy on the way.