Not sure if this right forum, sorry if its not. Now on to the questions.

Am total novice on this topic, so bear with me please....

Is it possible to host your own site?
If so, what do you need to do it?
And most importantly, what would the 'average' cost of such needs be?

Is it worth it? (cost/reliability etc)??


I know thats a lot of questions, but any answers greatly appreciated!!!!

Any PC with windows 2000/xp can use the built in IIS software to host a website.
To make it available to others on the web you would need a public IP address that you can point your website url to.

I.E you register your domain name with whoever you use (godaddy etc) and change the nameservers to point to your static IP.

You'd need to set up IIS to serve pages to internet users.
You'd also need to consider your internet connection. If its not always on broadband then theres no point even considering it as people will be unable to connect to your site when your pc is not online.

Also think about the fact that the PC would need to be on all the time, and that nasty people out there will be scanning for open ports that they can try and hack.

To be honest theres very little to be gained in attempting to host your website yourself as you can get basic hosting for free, or pay a few $'s a month and get a really reliable service.

Depends what you want to do with it i guess.

On the other hand theirs Linux. Linux is great for servers. Now with regard to what Pencer said about actually trying to run a site off a broadband connection, its hopeless. It is fun stuff to learn. I will give you a brief overview of where to start looking for answers...

First, you need a distro. I use various kinds, my favorite for servers is Trustix Secure Linux. I would say the learning curve is about medium. Another great place to look and learn about different distributions is....

http://linuxiso.org/

When you've found the perfect distro and have it installed, your going to need an HTTP server. Apache is the most popular, nonetheless here are a few to look at.

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Internet/WebServers/ As you can see there are quite a few.

Now, you have your server up and a couple html pages in the doc root so you need an easy name for everyone to remember.

I like to use Afraid.org. They offer free Dynamic DNS for sub-domains or even to host your own domains. I currently point one of my domains at my home server just for testing purposes and so I can easily access it when away from home.

That ought to give you just enough to have plenty more questions. Have fun, I know I do.

Thanks for all the help! Will certainly have a look further into this, but like you say, probably not worth doing myself.....just for the learning experience.....

thanks again