Hello,
I have been trying to get my Website back online for some time, however, I haven't been able to decide how.

I began my first Website over fifteen years ago on my school's servers, then when it got deleted at the end of that year, I built a new one using the free tier of a shared hosting service which served my well for eleven years until they discontinued their free subdomains and essentially forced their users to rent a new one from them if they wanted continued hosting. Thankfully this time, I could at least download my site instead of losing it and having to start from scratch once again!

I have checked out a number of other free shared hosts since, and none have been good enough, (most being extremely limited [moreso than I was ever used to] unless you paid money), plus I would like more flexibility to do more dynamic stuff. As such, I thought I should try self hosting, something that I've wanted to do for about a decade now anyway!

Microsoft Windows is what I know best and most enjoy, after being a user of it for about 22 years. I have been considering using Windows 2000 Server Edition (with IIS [or Apache/NginX if need be]) on my old PC as my Web server, as it seems to be considered abandonware by now (so it can be gotten easily for free without Microsoft seeming to mind, unlike later versions), contemporary to and compatible with the hardware I have available, and it's also the most up-to-date version which is user friendly and customizable to my liking to make it enjoyable to use.

I am aware that this OS has not received regular updates in a long time, (and had major known vulnerabilities which Microsoft couldn't or didn't fix even during the mainstream support period). Everything in life entails risks, and I am aware that this means my Website could be attacked more easily if someone wanted to.
This does not concern me, as I will be certain to keep regular backups so I can restore everything in such a scenario.
My concern is this: given that I will be hosting this Website from my home, will this draw undue attention to my local network and increase the chances of it being cracked into? I have secured separate static IP addresses for any Websites that I want to host, and could perhaps configure my router in some safer way if this would help, but I don't know whether that is enough. If it's a serious risk, that could be bad for me since the devices on my local network connected to the Internet also run unmaintained OSes. This part is non-negotiable — I am not willing nor able to change this, however, I am considering taking the leap into running my Web server on some version of GNU/Linux if that is considered a serious risk mitigation to the security of my home network. I have never used it, so there will certainly be a learning curve, but I may just need to take the plunge, as I know it's more secure, and also supports many more Internet application programs I might want to run such as an IRC bouncer or other things.

If you think that Windows 2000 Server isn't a crazy idea and might help me get my site back online more quickly, please let me know which edition is best if you have an opinion on that. WinWorld has a number of versions in their software library [winworldpc.com], and I wasn't sure whether the regular Windows 2000 Server or the Small Business Server version would be better.

If you think that using Windows 2000 Server is a terrible idea, and I should just leap into GNU/Linux, please let me know which distribution you think is best.
For this option, please consider that

1. I have never seriously used any Unix-like system in this way, and
   
2. I am planning to run this server on my old computer tower which is a Pentium 4 with 1.6 GHz CPU and maybe 1 GB of RAM (I can't remember exactly; it could have been upgraded to 2 GB since we got it around '02) so the distribution will need to be supported (most seem to still list i386 or i686 instruction set support)

My hope is that after the OS installation, I can just follow some simple instructions in order to install a Web server from the command line interface. I am comfortable enough with the CP/M, MS/DOS, or Windows-style commands and conventions, but I guess I'd just have to adapt to the Unix-style ones. I hope that I can get by installing everything I need to this way, and then administer remotely without having to think about it again. The Unix-style CLI seems like enough of a learning curve to me, so I would really rather not have to learn to use any of the window managers or desktop environments and force them into something tolerable to use. If it turns out that there's more to this than I thought and I do find myself needing a desktop environment, I would like to have something compatible with the Chicago95 GUI [github.com], as it's the only one I've seen that looks tolerable to use (seems to be designed primarily for XFCE or GTK)
It seems like Debian and Ubuntu are the big popular ones, though I've also been looking at antiX [en.wikipedia.org], which has rad release names, is advertised as lighter weight and more compatible with older PCs, and doesn't include "systemd", which I don't fully understand the function of, as I only see it spoken of around the Web as some sort of pernicious dependency implanted for the sole reason of stealing my freedoms or something! XD
I was hoping to get this running before the end of the year (which I'm aware is pretty soon, so any suggestions are much appreciated! :)

Thanks,
Thomas

[edited by: ThomasW at 5:22 am (utc) on Dec 31, 2020]