I use an Athlon 1500+ machine with 512 megs of RAM and a 120 gig hard-drive. I use it to serve web content, and also operate as a file server on my home LAN. My site traffic is about 100K hits a day total and I find the hardware adequate. The server runs Linux, specifically WhiteBox Linux.
My server does have SSH hosting capability, and this capability is built into most Linux distributions by default. If you want to setup SSH on Windows, look at this article:
http://www.vbmysql.com/articles/security/ssh-tunnel-part2.html
Yes it will work, you can install OpenSSH on Win2K3 and then connect through SSH tunnels for security, one again, see article.
Mike Hillyer, Technical Writer
MySQL AB, www.mysql.com
Office: +1 403-380-6535
Mobile: +1 403-330-0870
Blog:
http://www.openwin.org/mike