How to Host a Web Site

We have today purchased a new server to host three websites our company has. The server is going to run Windows Server 2003 and be connected to the DMZ port on our router.

Although there are tons of sites on how to pay someone to do site hosting for you, there’s not much on how to actually host a site yourself, especially using Server 2003.

I saw one site about using Apache installed on the Server 2003 NOS. This seems a viable option.

Does anyone have any recommendations on better hosting software? Or, any recommendations on an OS other than Server 2003 Enterprise Edition that could be better? Someone recommended a Linux flavor (forget which one) but I’m not too comfortable with Linux. In fact, to use Apache, I’m following instructions from a web site.