For what he's wanting to do, I think this is entirely overkill. If he's just hosting a TS server and a website for his friends, he could get away with an embedded system for next to nothing. It wouldn't be future proof, but I don't think one of the J1900 Celeron solutions would sneeze at it. He'd also be able to run it with all desktop components. I don't think a Xeon and ECC RAM is what you need here.
Haha! I know that feeling all too well. I think it happens to all of us. Good luck with your builds. I recently just went through and built a pfSense box and a NAS, so if you have any more questions, just ask me.