Has anyone here attempted this? I could only imagine doing this for a personal site and I have only heard of one person who did it successfully without any downtime and that was Markus Frind. I think he used his setups for a few months before using a commercial server.

How would someone even go about achieving this? Quite frankly, I think this would be dangerous from a personal site, even if you used a static IP address from a local dsl or cable provider because don't they have downtime for maintenance?

This has been discussed rather a lot and is generally thought of as inadvisable. There are too many problems with bandwidth requirements, downtime and so on, but if you wanted to do it just for the learning experience rather than for business or an important site, then it has it's place.

A learning experience would be fine but to have clients who depend on your stability and then poof, something happens, that is just a road I do not think anyone wants to take. Too risky to start with and I would hate to see the electric bill.

Don't use my cable provider - when they're down, it takes a week or two or three just to get someone onsite.

This is one of those classic epic questions you hear about almost daily all over hosting forums. The bottom line is...If you plan on hosting clients or anyone else that expects uptime and reliability from you, then NO!..However, if you plan on hosting your own website for testing and learning purposes, then go for it!

Just remember that hosting your own server from home is not recommended, and for good reasons.

As for studying and the bill. If we make some calculations we will see that it isn't that efficient to have a home server, and this is why:
Let's say you use a server consuming 300 Watts per hour at home. So if it is a server it is on 24x7. Now considering the NY electricity rate for example (17.23 cents per KwH) and performing some calculations:
24*30*0.30*0.1723~$37,21
So you will be paying $37,21 a month just in electricity to have a test ground at home. Of course it will be no good for business as it will depends greatly on your local ISP. And also you most likely do not have a backup power generator at home. Plus note that we didn't include the Internet rate here...

So i say - go with the cheapest VPS and you will get a better deal, even if it is just for testing.

My family has a server at their home. It's an older spare PC they had sitting around and they host a lot of photos from events happening in the area.

The website itself loads quite quickly because of well managed upload/download limits on the FTP, but every few weeks they have to send emails around with the IP changes and the domain going down temporarily because of it. FTP isn't used much on it at all and they have quite a fast connection, but you can notice it's not hosted in a datacenter and FTP really is crawling.

Not recommended. Like people have already mentioned, keeping a PC up 24/7 costs a lot more than a simple webhosting plan and downtime is frequent. Even if it's just for testing a small personal website, you're better off getting some cheap webhosting to suit your needs.

The only real benefit is the fact that you have complete control over the PC, but that's something you don't need for a website.

I've done this quite a few times. While it's great for testing and training on, I'd never suggest it for production.

There's many ways you can do it, but the best way IMO is to install CentOS on a spare PC. If you're not experienced you can install Webmin/Virtualmin. Use something like http://www.zoneedit.com/ if you need dns hosting, and auto update your dynamic IP with one of the many scripts available. Also make sure your router is forwarding ports for any services you need to your "home server".

If you've never done this it can take quite a while to get it right, but if you subtract the time waiting for installs, research, and do everything correctly this only takes 15-20 minutes.

Also, if you only need to host 1 domain you can use Plesk free of charge

While people used to do this sometimes (and there are probably still some on-line "how to host from home" guides on some forums)... the big problem is ISP's are monitoring bandwidth now and I just read that they are going to start adding charges or cutting back service for people that use more than "normal" bandwidth (some ISP's have already started in some parts of the country as "tests)
They claim in this economy bandwidth costs are too high with people downloading movies and uploading to You Tube etc. so they are going to limit bandwidth and charge a high per GB price for going over. This is coming soon. As I said AT&T and some other companies are already doing it in some areas of the country.

It concerns me as a combination host/web designer/and family man with 6 computers on my network that I may go over just from our normal use (plus the video games and such & the satellite box all of which are now "Internet devices")
So I don't think you should even consider hosting from home.

About the time you figure it out "how to" your ISP will probably cut you off.
With VPS as low as $20 and dedicated servers as low as $59-69 (about $129 with control panels and some "extras") there's really no reason. The $59-69 server would be the same as a home server if you leave off the extra software & support and a VPS will do whatever you want to learn (and they usually include all the control panels & such)

So if I were you I get a bare-bones VPS or server (some I have seen as cheap as $50) and learn on it. You'll be hacked within 20-30 minutes whether at home or with a "bought" server if you don't get it secured immediately - if you don't want to learn security then VPS is the way to go because they usually have basic security pre-configured.

I have a friend who used to set up his own servers at home with ADSL, hosting sites that are earning him about $150 a day from adsense. Much much cheaper way to do things.

You sure? If your sites are making $150 a day you hardly have a problem paying $20-50/month for a quality hosting account in a redundant data center.

Ok, note taken, do not host server at home.

I never thought about the expense side of things or the security for that matter. I wonder how Markus Frind was able to do so with absolutely no downtime or without getting hacked.

I know people that run gaming servers from home PCs on home connections with high enough upload speed... but the best choice would be of course a datacenter hosted server... definitely not web hosting server from home...

i have experience with running home server , and if you have reliable internet connection and uninterrubtible powerr supply there will be no problems.

2 things to consider.
1) can you guarantee power up time with a ups and how much does that power cost (typical server is $17/mo
2) What kind of up time is your isp giving you. If it is Cable or DSL you are probably looking at 99.0% which is horrible for a server.