First off, cacosapo mentioned a very valid point.... check to make sure that its ok with your hosting provider.

Then, to get your own irc server (daemon), i do not wish to recomend any specific one, since the opinions on which one is good are very different. I dont recommend setting up an irc server on a windows machine (no, im not bashing windows here), which means, if you get an irc server for your linux hosting machine, you cannot set it up at home on your windows machine to have a look at. In addition... before running your own irc server, its very important that you understand the tcp/ip protocol, linux, security, and the irc protocol. IRC servers can be a security leak in many aspects if not setup properly.

You also mentioned ftp.... well, i advise you to NOT use ftp... how do you connect to your hosted server? Do you have shell access on that machine? If you dont have any sort of shell access (ssh,telnet) etc... then you yourself can NOT run the IRC server on it, since you need to compile it and edit its settings. FTP is very UNSECURE, since the connection between client and server are not encrypted. If there is an SSH server running, then you can use sftp, or other windows ssh-file-transfer clients to upload/download your files in a secure manner.

More information would be great for me to understand the exact setup of your situation.

One last thing here.... in general... do NOT setup the irc server as user ROOT. Do it with a normal user account. At no stage whatsoever is root access needed to setup an irc server. But clear the other issues out first. Setting up an irc server is not 'dificult', but maintaining it properly can be a b!tch some times, and can cost you the health of the machine hosting it.

Cheers.