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We have a server that 1up! (A local web development company that mainly works with cms' for newspapers) donated to us. It is a quad-core xeon 2.4ghz machine with 4gbs of ram. Currently it's on a rack in a datacenter about 30 miles from where we are located. We use it for hosting our website, a small git repository (only because I like git better than subversion), an (currently non-functional) irc network and, in the future, some scripts to update social networking sites with data provided from FMS via twitter. Its running debian atm, with apache etc, the full works. Once you get the server doing what you want with it is pretty easy to get it working.
About getting to the server from school; our school has a firewall that blocks inappropriate things and the like, as well as several known "hackerish" ports, such as the one for ssh. This caused issues, obviously, when the database mysteriously crashed and we were unable to fix it for 8+ hours. We solved this by having 1up! configure the internet for the server (a psuedo-router I guess) port forward a few other ports to the ssh port. This basically solved all of our remote access issues because with ssh we gain sftp, so we can pretty much do anything.
The ideal server all depends on what your using it for. Initally, we had decided that we were going to build 3 brand new computers. 2 with the graphics cards donated by nVidia last year and one with only the intergrated graphics (the server). We had setup a budget for each with the hope of collocating the server in 1up! or perhaps another sponser's datacenter. I can go through thousands of intracacies with building specialized servers for rendering or NAS (rendering should have massive ammounts of HDD space as well as a good chunk of RAM, combined with some comercial grade graphics cards such as the nVidia quattro which are made for more specialized tasks than the consumer cards. The NAS basically can have whatever processor you want, with as much ram as you want, with as big as harddrives as you can afford. There is no big requirements like with rendering.), or I could ask what you think you'd like, as you seem reasonably knowledgable.
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