Hosting your own website can be an interesting project. Having you own server at home can help you learn the basics of how the internet works and provide the knowledge that will help you when dealing with various professional hosting providers. But is it sensible and practical? This post will provide several pros and cons to hosting your own website from home.
Highly Educational and Fun Experience
For most geeks just thinking about how to host my own website can be pretty exciting. It is a project that will make you learn a lot of things and will give all kinds of useful experience. To host your website successfully though you will need to know exactly what you are doing.
Slower Connection Speed
While hosting your own website you will inevitably run into the reality that your connection speed is much slower than that of the professional hosting companies. While some not quite so expensive hosts may have 1 to 2-second range, hosting locally you will likely encounter a 15 to 20-second range.
Electricity Costs
The answer to the question ‘how to host my own website’ is, it can be quite expensive. Your server will need to be turned on and connected to the internet at all times, so the costs can end up being higher than a simple professional VPS hosting plan. Apart from expecting high electricity costs, consider how often on average you are experiencing electricity outages. If any of those happen to occur, that stability of your website will be all over the place.
Hardware and Software Maintenance
Instead of everything being included in one package, you will also have to maintain your own hardware and software. You will need to spend extra money on all kinds of equipment such as UPS, backup systems, software patch handling systems and so on.
Having in consideration all of that, while the question ‘how to host my own website’ can be an intriguing one, it is also likely to bring more drawbacks than benefits. Don’t get us wrong: hosting your own website is certainly doable, just in most cases it is not worth the time or the effort. Depending on what type of website you are planning on hosting, there are three different options that professional hosting providers can offer and among them you will definitely find what you need.