Can I Host My Site at Home on My Personal Computer?

SELF-HOSTING - SHOULD YOU CONSIDER IT?

Most people who have their own websites are a little more technically savvy than others so it’s not unusual that some might contemplate hosting their sites on their own personal computers from their home or office.

Can I host my website myself, using my own personal computer?

Yes, you can! And if you have an old spare computer sitting around unused and your site is primarily for personal purposes, there’s no reason you couldn’t, or shouldn’t. If you have a small personal website and you don’t care if it goes down for brief periods of time fairly often then you might well want to consider doing it yourself.

But if your site is used for any type of business purpose where it’s important that it is up and running all the time and that it is very secure, then doing it yourself is not usually the best idea.

Here are some of the things you should know and will want to consider before jumping in.

You should know how to setup WWW server software, such as Apache, on your computer. This software is what allows Internet users to access the files on your computer that you intend to share across the web.
Since your Internet Service Provider (ISP) will be the one whose bandwidth you will use to run your website from home, you’ll need to make sure they offer the bandwidth you’ll need and that you won’t run into any problems with any of their Terms of Service.
Your computer will have to stay on at all times – if you intend for the site to be accessible at all times. If you turn your computer off or reboot it, your site will become inaccessible until it comes back on.
Your website will probably load slowly as home internet connections aren’t designed for serving web pages. But, again, this won’t matter if you’re doing it more to play around and experiment with it.

Hosting at home, we think is a great idea for young people and students who are interested in learning the real ins and outs of how web servers work. This would be an ideal way to learn without worrying about hurting anything. All you would need from the outside would be a domain name that routes to your computer. And that can be a bit of a logistical nightmare if you don’t have a static IP address from your ISP. But, if all you want to do is use it as a learning platform, it’s an ideal way to learn.