I have been wanting to do a dedicated server for a while now, but I understand you are on your own for the most part when it comes to technical problems which is not good for me.
I don’t want to spoil anyone’s ideas, but server administrators make pretty good money, and it’s not because server administration is easy. As far as I know, anyone reading is capable of learning it, but there’s a lot involved.
If anyone is going to go with a self managed sever, make certain that you keep plenty of back ups. Not applying a patch immediately can leave you vulnerable to hacks. Applying patches immediately can make you the guinea pig when the patch goes wrong. When you do discover that a server is hacked… that doesn’t mean it was just hacked and last week’s back up will do. Exploited machines will often sit around for awhile before they are used. On the good side, if your machine gets exploited, the attacker will usually patch up the hole for you so someone else doesn’t come in.
I don’t mean to sound all doom and gloom…. but if you control your own machine and you see how many scripts hit it and how many people poke at it in various ways, you’ll know what I mean. Of course, it’s up to you to install the firewalls and software that will tell you you’re being poked at.
OTOH, paying somone else to manage… they might not do much better. There’s a lot of people out there hosting that have no idea what they are doing. The best thing would be to go managed-dedicated with a very trustworthy place. Even then, nothing is hackproof. One good thing about that is that you’ll be the only one with access at all, as opposed to shared servers where a ton of people already have their foot in the door.