I have no Idea on lunix operating systems (all I know is that there are thousands which makes it even more confusing), Im going to have to read into all that too…

Running a server off your home connection is not only a mistake but is also most likely against the TOS of your ISP.

Layered Tech offer pretty cheap servers and have a whole different set of ranges with specs.

Because it is your first time, I’d recommend getting Debian installed (unless you decide to go with a Windows server). You can then use apt-get to install the different packages for the functionality you need instead of compiling from source.

Howtoforge has some good beginner articles for setting up servers (Perfect setup guides). They then cover advanced topics as well.

The MyBB server runs Fedora Core 3 (ewww) with most packages compiled from source (because they’re newer than the packaged versions available and give me extra flexibility).

Where can I find a good deal to buy a dedicated server?
Can you focus on any tutorials or any good tutorials sites on getting a dedicated server and setting it up?

At the moment i’m running on stock configurations of PHP and MySQL because I haven’t had a chance to actually customise them. I’ve always been able to get decent speeds from MySQL, the problem is making sure your indexes are correct in your tables and you keep your database clean (optimize and analyze tables often).

Make sure you’re logging slow queries too - that can help if you want to determine which is taking too long to execute and needs to be revised.

One of the projects i’m involved in, the Messenger Plus! Custom Sounds feature, is controlled by servers in the backend - we’re dealing with probably around 1,000 queries per second to and from the database. Our setup is not small however, we’re using 3 servers for file storage as well as 1 for the SQL databasel. We’ve gone through numerous structural designs in the database as well as filesystem and many changes to the configuration files for both PHP and MySQL to make sure everything is running at a optimal speed - so basically with the right structure and configuration you can achieve your 1,000 queries per second.

I do have a quick question though. For those 0.03 second load times, how many queries are being made? I’m assuming that you’re running PHP on Apache with MySQL, probably, but I’ve always had trouble getting that kind of speed from MySQL. SQL Server is no problem, it’ll handle a thousand queries a second (simple ones, like a blog or forum would mostly make), but my MySQL setup only seems to be able to hit about a quarter of that speed…

P4 2.8ghz (Only one processor at the moment ;))
1024mb RAM
80gb HDD
1000gb monthly transfer.

The old one was a Celeron 2.4 with only 512mb RAM so thats why there is such a difference - having the cache of the P4 as well as other differences between the entry level Celerons and the actual P4’s.