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If I were you, I'd just jump into this with Google as your guide. My experience has been that if I stick to fairly common hardware and software, then anything I come up against already has a solution out on a blog somewhere.
In this case, it's not that hard. I'd put Ubuntu on the machine, just because it's very common and issues are well understood and easy to resolve, and it's probably the most user-friendly distro available right now.
The only thing to deal with that I can see from here is your connectivity. You're going to use commodity DSL or cable? Can you get a fixed IP from them? Anything in your terms of service about using their service for web hosting?
Set up your switch to route requests on port 80 to your server. If you're doing SSL, then route port 443 there as well.
Then, set up Apache, and use name-based virtual hosting to host multiple sites. You don't need a separate physical box for separate sites (unless your traffic justifies that, in which case, man up for some real hosting). Keeping it on a single server cuts down your network complexity drastically. Just make sure you implement a data backup strategy.
EDIT: (Also what Eden said. I'm not going to advise you on security issues beyond saying: don't do this. But since you're going to ignore that anyway....)
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