Windows XP/Apache hosting questions...

Hello

I recently aquired a business account with my own static IP address and primary/secondary DNS numbers and then spent weeks learning all of the ins and outs of running a web server, SMTP server, installing Perl, PHP/MySQL, configuring routers, configuring my machine, WANS, LANS, DNS, network security, etc...on and on it goes!!.

I must say that I have learned a great deal from all of this and it has been a very rewarding experience for me indeed (although I still have a l-o-n-g ways to go!). At the moment, I have successfully begun fully-hosting my domain on my machine and everything works great. Now I can brag to people that I own my own "server farm"...lol.

Anyway, the thing is, that I am doing all of this on a Windows XP machine which is more or less an enhanced spin-off of NT 4.0 and is also similar to Windows server 2000. At any rate, I was just wondering if there is anything in particular that I need to be aware of as I get really deep into this. What are some things you folks would recommend in terms of enhancing security, increasing speed and performance, pitfalls, etc?.

I'm running Apache 2.0, Perl, Sendmail, Php/MySql, etc on an E-machine (don't laugh!) with a 1.3G processor, 20G HD and 384MB of RAM and all works great and I've gone over just about everything a million times but there's always going to be somthing that I "missed" I'm sure:).

PS: I thought I should mention that I am an avid Linux user too and that the only thing stopping me from hosting on Linux at the moment is that I am waiting for the final release of Fedora core2# to come out....

Thank's!