Building A Server For Colocation

In me effort to go colo I have been studying as best I can different server builds. Here is some information you may want to know or be able to help me and others with.

Quest: Build a server designed for serving html and other uses as a webserver (mail, database, etc). Limux operating System

Chipset- Although I found a lot of good and bad motherboards, I could find no information regarding chipsets and Linux. maybe it does not matter, who knows? Also..upgrading motherboard and chipset AFTER server is up and running seems like a challenge.

Harddrives- It would seem best to get a harddrive made for a 24/7 uptime. Not ALL drives are like this. Seemingly, unconfirmed, SCSI drives are for this pupose. However, Western Digital has made some 'RE' drives that are to be up 24/7 with no issues.
Note: 7200+ rpm drives appear to fail more often and some suggest a more stable 5400rpm.

Built in NIC vs Adding one- Very little could be found on this, but would assume a much better one should be bought and not use an onboard one. Some onboards can have probelm with some linux distros too. I would buy one and add it...a good one.

CPU- very little talk was available on linux's use of multiple CPUs. Very little talk was available on speed and use of multiple versus single cpu units. Example- how would a single cpu of 3ghz do against 2 CPUs of 1.8ghz.
Having two CPUs does allow for a server to utilize different CPUs for different processes, so if one is busy, the other can be used.
No information was really available on the difference..or what you should buy for the actual CPUs.

RAM- Buttloads of ram out there. No info on what works best with linux, which works best for a server, or what kind would work best for a server.

Motherboard- many are available and many suggest different kinds, but no definitive reasons have been given. No idea which would be best for a linux web server.

Control panel versus no control panel - after a little learning curve it would appear a non control panel is easy to use for a single user server. Control panels are buggy, have many issues, but do allow multi user systems and shared servers to be easily used. Some seem very limited in the updated versions of software. I will be going with fedora, but no control panel. The overhead is not something I want to deal with..or the bugs, or the old software, of the issues of upgrading. Ensim and cpanel seem most used and professionally serviced.

Raid- Just working on this one. No real info as to the best type of raid card for a linux webserver. Raid 1 is a mirror system i believe that allows you to have two drives where one is a ghost of another (sort of)? Do not know how much this slows the system or the drives down, but a mirror would be best in the case of a failure.
Do not know what happens when there is a failure (will system freeze, ignore it, hang?)

Partition of drives: It would seem that putting the linux system on one aprtition, the /home directory on another, and perhaps the mail directory on another is a way to make it easier to deal with certain issues. If you need to compile, reinstall, or whatever with linux and all your data is not on the partition, it becomes easier. If a partition gets screwed, the data is spread out, so much can not be destroyed. The actual amounts for the partitions are not evident in my research.

ANyway, that is a synopsis of info I have been perusing these last few days. Usually you can only find someone talking about something they use and like, but no real details to balance out why something else will not be as good.

One other note: Distros of llinux are all over the place. But for a webserver I do not think any distro is really needed. Perhaps just building your own kernel would be good (and a great learning experience)...but that remains to be seen.

I will be posting a web page in the coming weeks with a detail of how I built, where i bought, and how I installed, my new server here.