Maintenance of the PC must be proper so that failures and the need to restart are kept to the minimum. Once you become your own provider, you have to make your site available through your PC; to achieve this, the reliability and performance remains crucial.
What is needed?
- A home PC running windows XP (we will only include windows in this guide. It could as well be a Linux or a different OS)
- A high speed (DSL, Cable) or dial-up Internet access. (High speed and more permanent connection like cable or DSL is preferred).
- You only need an assembled PC; however, a branded PC is preferred for its reliability.
- You would need to be running a windows firewall or a third party firewall to defend your system against Internet security threats.
What are the main obstacles?
- Your ability to offer web or other access from your PC to a number of visitors is mainly limited by the connection speed (limiting the number of users who can connect simultaneously)
- Secondly, it is limited by the performance / reliability of your PC and network, which may be incomparable with a web host.
- ISP Policies- It may be against the ISP policies for you to host a site from home. They might even block some of the common TCP/IP ports required for hosting which can complicate your efforts.