Can I build an server with an old Pentium 4 HT?

[Filz]

Hello, I'm new to this community therefore I'm sorry if this isn't the appropriate place to post this.

Now onto my question.

I have at home an REALLY old PC, with an Intel Pentium 4 clocked at 3.00gHz with Hyperthreading, 1gb of RAM, a 512mb ATI Graphics card, in a motherboard that I don't know the model, but that I can find out if needed and finally a random 2,5" 500gb I salvaged of an old laptop that didn't work anymore with a speed of 5400 RPM.

I'm currently finishing a Multimedia Vocational course, where we learn lot's of things related to that area, but the one I like the most is web development, therefore I would like to setup the PC above especially for web development, I know that this is possible via XAMPP however I would like to host my own websites on this PC due to the fact that my final project is an PHP webstore for a brand of a friend of mine.

What I did to keep the costs low with this project was rent a cheap server for about 15€ and then got this free domain that really does not work really well because is .tk and nobody likes to go on a website that doesn't have the common .com or something more known. So I thought that it would be a great idea to host this website myself and pay for a good .com domain the problem is that I don't know how to do the hosting my website part, I know the theory where you have to setup an FTP server and all that baloney but I want to know how to do this properly, and since I'm a big fan of LTT I thought that this would be a great place to ask for some help. I know there are some tutorials online, but they didn't seem very explicit to me.

So if someone can help me I would be very happy because at the moment this pc is doing nothing even though it's fully operational.

So thanks in advance for any help!

[SadSmileyFace]

To answer the question in the title, yes you can. With that being said your server might run somewhat slow...

The other stuff is beyond my knowledge so, I can't help you with that.

[Electronics Wizardy]

You can run it as a server, but if your paying for power its better to get a modern low end system as P4's use lots of power.

[AdmnPower]

The following link includes some basics on how to setup a Linux server to host websites. Your pc's specs exceed the minimum system requirements to run Ubuntu and as far as cutting costs you can't really do much better than free, open source software. 

 

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-apache-mysql-php-lamp-stack-on-ubuntu-14-04

 

 

[southpaw5271]

I used to run Ubuntu server 9.04 on a P4HT box. For personal use and a beginner such as yourself, that old box will be fine. As long as you don't expect too many users to be using it at once. I'd recommend downloading Xubuntu 16.04LTS. It's just Ubuntu with a more lightweight desktop environment. When it comes to those old P4s, you want as lightweight as possible.