I second hostgator - have been with them for 3-4 years now.. very little downtime (and they actually tell you when maintenance happens)
easy setup and maintenance, great prices too.
As for setting up your own server, a PIII 500 w/ 512M ram would be more than enough to run Apache, it's what the users do with the server that counts. If you have multiple SQL databases and massive forum connections, you would have to ramp up the disk access speed and ram.
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I'll learn to manage my anger, when people learn to manage their stupid.
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