Hello,
I am Belgian, 34 years old, I have quite a lot of real working experience in IT, almost 15 years, working with linux and windows servers, I have been working with Nestle, Ozone, LAN10, tour & taxis and many other smal companies.
It's a piece of cake for me to install, configure and maintain linux servers.
But I have a question, do you plan to only use linux or do you plan to use or play with any windows feature like exchange or such? If this is the case, I would recommend using a vmware esx server, as you can run multiple virtual machines on the same computer, manage resources and easily put a server down for maintenance without affecting the whole system..
Anyway, I would recommend you to buy 2 or even 3 hard disk drives, the same size but from different series or manufacturers, to setup a raid array (if you buy hard drives from the same manufacturer, from the same series, from the same shop, chances are they will fail together at the same time..)
I am available almost immediately on freelancer or skype or google hangouts etc..
I would do the setup with you, step by step, and write a re-installation/disaster recovery procedure with you..