I think the common answer to questions of server administration on HN is to send people over to http://www.stackoverflow.com http://www.stackoverflow.com They

I think the common answer to questions of server administration on HN is to send people over to http://www.stackoverflow.com http://www.stackoverflow.com They handle the more nuts and bolts aspects of setting up servers and programming. The reason that Microsoft calls it a "server" os is because on the XP/vista they limit the number of concurrent incoming connections that the server can handle at any time to something like 5 or 10. They also limit the number of processors to 2. So basically installing software in the server version is identical to the consumer version. But to answer your question briefly, setting up server programs in windows entails going to each of the websites and downloading the programs. Double click and install. This is a bit different than the *nix way of having a central repository where you can apt/yum/dpkg/etc... to your hearts content. Also, while it is of course possible to install software from source it is not really common on the windows side of the fence. lightweight webserver: nginx(http://wiki.nginx.org/Main http://wiki.nginx.org/Main), maybe apache if you configure it. I would steer clear of IIS(which is preinstalled in the server version usually) I don't know of a good sftp server for windows but there should be plenty of them out there.