I currently host through Featureprice.com and I host http://www.collegecommunityonline.com as well as several other domains.

I may change hosts soon, but although I can find a way to live without "unlimited" space, I can't live without hosting multiple domains. I can't afford to pay for 5 accounts to host 5 domains.

So I was thinking about setting up a server on my PC at Georgia Tech.

What are your thoughts on maintaining a home server?

How much bandwidth do you think Gatech will let me use from my server.

I'll be using Red Hat Linux 6.2, is this a decent operating system for running a server?

Is there a decent Java servlet engine that I can use for a home server?

How difficult would it be to set up perl, cgi, C, and PHP?

What security arrangements should I be aware of, since I will be hosting other sites?

How difficult would it be to create a "mega server" by networking with another tech student's computer which will also have a server on it?

Thanks.

You are lucky in some regards. Gatech.edu is a good pipe and they will allow a bit of bandwidth without shutting you off. That's the good news. The bad news is that you shouldn't ever expect a "home" setup to have near the uptime of a solid hosting company. You simply don't have the redundancy in place to do so.

Having said that, installing the above mentioned software is not all that difficult of a task. You should spend some time thinking about security. Any *nix box on gatech.edu is likely to be scanned and hacked if you are not careful. There is an element that looks for these boxes daily...

I'd recommend installing RedHat 7.1, that will come preconfigured with Perl, PHP, MySql, Postgres, IPChains, and other software, to make your life easier, besure to have all patches installed for the server, and possibly run a hardware firewall to block all un-needed ports, besure to not turn telnet on, and use SSH....

Usually a universtity will limit the allowance of running servers on there network, but some may, I'm not totally sure about Georgia. Any servers on a edu network, are completely open to attacks and are usually comprimised offten, this is just campus life....

Yeah, security is a big concern of mine.

I think we will be using Red Hat 6.2 for a class, so I'll probably be using that. Unless the C compiler and interpreter are the same for Red Hat 7.1.