Self Hosting in the FIOS Era

I'm seriously thinking about bringing my web hosting in-house. The reason is that Verizon FIOS makes this not only possible, but very attractive: I can get a static IP with 20/20MB service for less than $150.00 a month. That's dirt cheap, and 20MBs is far more outbound bandwidth than I need; I might even be able to get away with 20/5 at $99.00 per month.

I don't really like external hosting. A co-located server would be better, but that's fairly expensive. In-house does have some downsides, but it has some good points too. The biggest downside is the possibility of being down due to a power failure. Verizon does provide battery backup for its equipment, but that's only good for a few hours - if there was a major power outage here, my site could be dead, dead, dead.

The big advantage of in-house is that the equipment is right here in front of me. Modern hosting offers pretty darn close to that through web controlled KVM's, but still: an in-house server really is right here. I can see it, touch it, kick it. I can build a new server right beside it, test, and switch over in literally seconds when I want to. I can run it inside a VM and migrate it to another machine almost efforlessly. I can have all the disk space I need and of course back it up locally very quickly.

On the security side I'd definitely be better off: I don't need any inbound ssh from the big bad world at all.. and can put whatever hardware and software I want ahead of it for the services I do need. This is very, very tempting..

I have to think this over very carefully. If I do this, I need to decide what OS to use: Mac OS X, BSD, Linux.. and if it is Linux, which one? Decisions, decisions.. your thoughts and comments will be appreciated!