Every so often someone hears that hosting is "just a computer" and reasonably asks: I have a computer. Why am I paying someone?

It's a fair question with an unglamorous answer. You're paying for the things that make a computer suitable for being on the internet all day, every day, unattended.

What self-hosting involves

1. A machine that stays on — an old desktop, a Raspberry Pi, a small server.
2. Web server software (nginx or Apache) installed and configured.
3. A static IP address, or a dynamic DNS service to work around not having one.
4. Port forwarding on your router so the outside world can reach it.
5. A security certificate, renewed every 90 days unless automated.
6. Power that doesn't go out, and an internet connection that doesn't drop.
7. Patches, backups, and someone who notices when it stops working.

None of this is beyond a hobbyist. All of it is beyond what a plumber should be doing at 9pm.

The problems, in order of how often they bite

Upload speed

Home internet is built for downloading. A typical cable connection might give you 300 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up. Page views travel up. A site with a couple of photos will feel slow to anyone on a phone, and the difference is noticeable.

Power and connection

A summer storm takes out power for two hours. Your website is down for two hours, during which someone looking for a plumber finds an error page. A hosting company has generators and redundant connections; your basement has a surge protector.

Your IP address changes

Most home connections get a new address occasionally. You can work around this with a dynamic DNS service, but now you've added another thing that can break, and another account.

Security

A machine serving web traffic from your home network is a machine on your home network. If it gets compromised, the attacker is inside your house, next to your family's laptops. Hosting companies isolate this by design.

Nobody else can fix it

When it breaks and you're away, or busy, or you've forgotten how you set it up two years ago, there's no support line. The site stays down until you get to it.

When it's a fine idea

• You're learning and the site is a project, not a business.
• It's internal — a page that only needs to work on your own network.
• You're technical, you enjoy it, and you've thought about the failure modes — with a UPS, a static IP or good DDNS, and automated backups.
• You're running something in the cloud anyway — a $5 VPS is self-hosting in the useful sense: you administer it, but somebody else owns the building. See what hosting is for that middle ground.

That last one is the honest compromise. If the appeal is control rather than saving $8 a month, a small VPS gives you root access to a machine that has power, cooling and a support ticket queue.

The money, honestly

Self-hosting saves maybe $60–$150 a year compared with shared hosting. Against that: an old machine drawing 30–60 watts continuously costs $30–$70 a year in electricity, plus a UPS if you're serious, plus your time.

The savings are close to zero. The risk is a website that's down when a customer looks, which costs more than a year of hosting the first time it happens.

What to do instead

If you want the cheapest reliable thing: a free one-page service for a simple site, or $4–$8 a month of shared hosting for a WordPress site. Both are less work than self-hosting and both stay up when your power doesn't.

If you want to learn how it works, host something that doesn't matter — a photo gallery for yourself, a page for a club. Keep the business site somewhere boring and reliable.