Hosting your website off your home PC. Is a personal web server a good idea?

I’m willing to bet that when you started your first website you got the idea, at least once, to save money by hosting your website on your home PC and internet connection. Starting a personal web server to host your website of your home computer has always been an interesting idea to me…but is it a good idea?

Be prepared to learn a lot!

If you really want to go through with starting a web server on your own you better be prepared to learn a lot and also spend a lot of time testing. In all honesty, if you know nothing about web servers I highly suggest you give up and go with a reputable web hosting service.

A headache and a half!

When I first setup a personal web server at my house it took me roughly 2 weeks to figure everything out like installing Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, configuring PHP to work with MySQL, etc. I cannot tell you how many times during those 2 weeks I was tempted to throw my server out the window and say to hell with it.

Your ISP might not be equipped to host a website from.

Even if you have the fastest DSL or cable connection you might not have enough power to host your own website. When running a web server, download speed is not important at all. The main factor to serving out fast web pages is your connections’ upload speed. The fact is that cable and DSL usually have crappy upload speed and throughput. Not only that but some ISPs even have clauses in their terms of service that customers are not allowed to host websites from their home connection.

The cost of leaving your computer on 24 hours a day.

Even though I stopped using my home server a long time ago, I still leave on my personal computer 24 hours a day. I have calculated that leaving one computer on 24 hours a day costs roughly $20/month (depending on your computer specs). So if you are used to leaving your computer running 12 hours …