What's cheaper and what's better?

[Pathetic]

buying a server and setting it up as a server? or buying a normal computer and then setting it up as a server?

[Robert]

What's cheaper: buying a normal computer
What's Better: Buying a computer specifically built to be a server.

You can't compare. However, if you are running a site that doesn't use to much system resources and doesn't recieve too many hits (less than 100,000 a month), you could use a normal computer. Even better if you ran it off a cable/dsl connection at your house.