First off, is there a reason you're wanting to host your own website? It would probably be much cheaper to just buy some shared hosting (we're talking $6/month in some cases). Not to mention the fact that most home ISPs actually forbid you from running servers like that.
Even if you did for some reason want to host it yourself, I would second dalecosp's advice on keeping it simple as far as hardware and the OS. With a good *nix distro, you can easily use a computer that wouldn't even be worth $200 by today's standards and setup Apache on it to serve up a website with a small to modest load.
TyCox wrote:I have read that 32bit with 4gb ram isn't much of a change.
It's not "much of a change" because the 32bit OS probably can't see more than ~3.25GB, so going from 3GB to 4GB is just adding a stick of RAM that the OS won't really ever use much of.
At any rate... If you're into wasting money on hardware, you should look at an Apple product instead. :p
TyCox wrote:So i might as well buy a 32bit with 2gb or 3gb.
Well first of all, I don't think you can even buy new brand name computers with 32-bit hardware nowadays. The 32-bit is only going to come into play when you're picking which O/S to install, but note that 32-bit is pretty much on its way out the door by now. The 64-bit versions of Windows have been around for quite some time now due to the fact that we've long ago reached the limit of the 32-bit O/S's and that they're quickly becoming obsolete. Not to mention that it costs $0 to upgrade to the 64-bit version.
TyCox wrote:I would like to have the highest download and upload kb/s as possible.
So would everyone. :p But this really doesn't have anything to do with the hardware or software you buy; the bottleneck there is definitely going to be the connection speed to your ISP.
EDIT: For example, in regards to hosting a webserver on a residential ISP connection, I note that Time Warner Cable specifies this in their Operator AUP:
Time Warner Cable wrote:Unless you have specifically subscribed for commercial grade service, the ISP Service is provided to you for personal, non-commercial use only. The service cannot be used for any enterprise purpose whatsoever whether or not the enterprise is directed toward making a profit. If it is your intention to use this service for these purposes, please contact Operator to inquire whether commercial grade service programs are available.
They don't go on to clarify what an "enterprise purpose" is, partly I suspect because they like to leave such ambiguous phrases wide open to suit their own judgment.
Also, note that there are two more issues I can think of in regards to hosting a web server on a residential-based connection:
Your upload speed is probably considerably less than your download speed. You can test this using speed tests such as this one, but more than likely you're not going to have adequate upload bandwidth to serve web pages up to more than a couple/few visitors without making them feel like they're on a dial-up connection (or worse!).
Your IP address is most likely dynamic, meaning it can change from time to time when your DHCP lease expires and your modem attempts to renew it. Since domain names don't mean anything in terms of connecting to a host on the internet, you'll have to keep updating the IP address that your domain name resolves to.
Fortunately, there are free convenient services such as DynDNS that offer solutions to this problem.
