it sounds like your very new to all this and so your going to have to do a LOT of reading and learning.
for you, your best bet is to install an all in package on your local lan machines and play with it there, then transfer to a payed for co-location server later once you know enough and want more speed for your users.
Apache2Triad, that can be found and simply installed on any of your VM cable LAN machines as a self contained unit on a windows OS, and has all that you might need ,except OC in your case a ready made forum, but you want to learn how to make that from scratch yourself you say....
http://apache2triad.net/
do a search on here for
webserver and you might find some more information as regards rebol and other scripting languages and help, theres quite a bit....