How to setup tower/rackmount/blade servers?

In the future, I'm looking to set up my own server rather than living off of shared hosting, so I would really appreciate some guides or help in the process of configuring a server.

I've looked all over the Internet but I can't find anything about the initial setup process of a server, only articles and guides regarding people who have infinite knowledge of servers and want to add more functionality, performance, etc.

Currently, this is all hypothetical until I have the funds to set up a server, but I would like to be able to start researching it and teaching myself about it now so I'm prepared in the future.

I've read all the guides about setting up servers on home computers, but of course that is not what I want to do, and they usually deal with the free server OSes like Ubuntu. Will something like Ubuntu handle, say, 100,000 page requests per day when there is a substantial amount of images, javascript, and CSS? Or would I go with something like Red Hat? Or does it even matter?

Sticking with 1 Lakh page requests, what would be better: tower, rackmount, or blades? And how do I go about configuring these in a general sense? I'm sure it varies by manufacturer, network configuration, OS, server software, etc. I would want to run MySQL/PHP on whatever server would be best for the job (Apache?).

The thing is, while I'm sure it varies like I said above, I can't find anything about how to initially set up any of the three web servers so that they are even live on the Internet. So any links to guides, etc. would be great. And please don't flame me for being a noob. I acknowledge that I am a noob, but I am trying to fix that now so I know what I'm doing in the future.

Thank you so much!

The thing about servers is that they're just another computer. If you're going to do this for real in the future, just get an old computer and install it with a 'server' flavour of your favourits Linux distirbution, say CentOS, Debian, SLED, etc., and go and play.

If you can set it up in a closed environment, then you can do it for real when your final system is plugged into the internet. You'll learn far more by setting up a server system than you will by reading lots of stuff about it in advance.

And all the modern distributions can handle the volume of requests you want, your biggest problem if you get to that level of traffic will be the internet bandwidth to your server.