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I personally wouldn't bother with a physical server... you can get all the functionality and relevant "education" by just messing around with server applications on your regular computer. People really only use separate machines if they need one or more dedicated 24/7 servers running. Different server applications exist for different purposes. Something like those old HP computers, in my opinion, would be more trouble than they're worth to run something even as simple as a vanilla minecraft server.
A good resource to just get used to the basics of something like website development is W3Schools. Some people hate on it but it's decent. That's what I used to learn back when I was in 4th grade and it's improved a lot since then, and it includes reference on everything from HTML/CSS/JS all the way to C, C++, and C#. Programming is daunting at first but if you just take it one bite at a time, the skills will compound and you'll get decent in no time if you're consistent with it. It's a different way of thinking that you just have to build and build.
For hardware and software, I think just exposure helps. Watch tech videos, ask people questions. I'm not really a hardware guy beyond knowing at a basic level what each component of a computer does.