DIY hosting

[noobiesearcher]

is there anything special you need to do to be your own host?

[glc]

Before people tell you everything you need, I just want to jump in and say that decent hosts are so cheap these days it really isn't worth trying to do it yourself if all you need a is a small personal site. Most residential ISP's don't allow you to run public servers anyway.

[mairving]

Before people tell you everything you need, I just want to jump in and say that decent hosts are so cheap these days it really isn't worth trying to do it yourself if all you need a is a small personal site. Most residential ISP's don't allow you to run public servers anyway.
Plenty of other stuff to add to GLC's comments. Hosts are cheap, reliable, generally secure and most are up 99% of the time. If you host one at home, it is cheap but it is not generally reliable, not secure and you are doing good to have 50-75% uptime. There are plenty of crackers out there looking for people running servers out of their home because they are easier targets for them than others.