I am in the process of moving my site to a dedicated server. I am unsure however of what kind of configuration I choose opt for.

I more or less ruled out the Cobalt servers. From what I read elsewhere in this forum, it seems that they lack flexibility.

Most companies offer Red Hat Linux servers but others seem to prefer FreeBSD. Virtualis for instance does not seem to support Linux. What are the pros and cons of each OS?

Some entry levels Solaris servers are only slightly more expensive than Linux based servers. Is there any reason to choose a Solaris server rather than the other two?

I am also wondering what is a decent RAM configuration? How does the RAM affect the overall performance of the server? What are the most RAM intensive applications?

I use Links SQL but my site has an e-commerce component as well which is currently completely outsourced. We would like to host it on our own server ASAP.

Any advice is welcome. Thanks for your help.

Jean--