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Is it a good idea to host my website at home? Question
I have a physical machine available and I don't want to pay hosting fees. What if I just host my website on my home server? What are common pitfalls of doing so?
1 answer
It is usually not a good idea to do this. The advent of the Internet was revolutionary in that it allowed anyone with a computer and a modem to self-publish effortlessly. However, in the decades since, major corporations have began to push back on this. Today, "residential internet service" is not commonly considered to include traditional self-publishing, and is thought of as merely the ability to connect to the Internet as a client.
In practice:
- Many ISPs forbid hosting websites in their ToS. They'll say it's because of "abuse", but in reality it's because they want you to pay for "business" service which will normally be the same exact bandwidth but 5 times the price. Since they do it to squeeze money out of customers, it's unlikely that you can talk your way into an exception. They run automated port scanners and if they discover low-ports open on your IP you might get phone calls threatening to terminate your service.
- Another common case is ISPs not outright forbidding it, but making it impractical by blocking low-ports on their network and/or proprietary router. You will waste a lot of time working around these restrictions, and the knowledge you gain will not be applicable in the context of non-shoestring budget hosting.
- There are a lot of people these days running automated hacking scripts on basically every IP. You will have people trying to break in constantly. Of course, you should secure your server. But if you end up leaving a hole and the hackers find it, they now have access to your home network and other computers on it as well.
- It's very easy to geolocate IPs and you'd be announcing your home address, with the precision of a few blocks or less, to everyone in the world.
A much better option is to rent a VPS, which can be had for <$10/mo (much less if you shop around). Typically, cloud providers such as AWS will also offer a free tier or trial, where you can effectively get a low-powered virtual machine (t2.micro EC2 on AWS) that you can use as a server.
There are certain ISPs that don't have the restrictions I mention and explicitly support self-hosters. For example, at one point Sonic in the Bay Area did this (don't know if the policy continues). Unfortunately, the size of ISPs seems to correlate with being more user-hostile, so chances are that the ISPs you have available in your area will not be the nice kind. Even if they are, you still have the concern with security and privacy.
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