Anyone host their own server from home?

Give how cheap hosted servers are (from about $5 a month) I'd probably use one of those instead. More hassle to run it at home and the electricity it uses will cost more than a server would.

I highly recommend just using AWS or another public cloud for a production site and using your local machine just for dev. The cost and friction of AWS is quite low, and it's much easier to scale up as needed and achieve high availability.

The things that worry me about hosting a production site or app from home:

• If electricity goes out, you're running on a limited supply of backup power, assuming you have a UPS
• If your home internet service provider goes down, your site or application goes down
• If you experience increased traffic, you either have to scramble to set up more machines, or your site goes down
• Clients are connecting to an IP on your home network, which can make your home network a target for hackers

If you're wanting to host a static site, you can host it on S3/Cloudfront for next to nothing, and latency will be low thanks to the Cloudfront CDN.

If you're wanting to host an application or API, I recommend using Lambda / Serverless framework. It's easy to work with, easy to scale, and is often more affordable than EC2 since you're only charged when your Lambdas run. If you to use a different stack or run more custom software, Elastic Beanstalk and plain EC2 are still great.

I've tried a couple of times but it was never worth it. It wasn't any cheaper because of the time spent mucking around with things and then the reliability of your internet connection/router isn't as high as a data-center, so connection goes down sometimes. Saved more time (and hence money) hosting on cheap providers like Digital Ocean. Using AWS / Heroku these days but proper infrastructure is where its at.

My dad runs servers from home but only for his personal site really.

He’s running Sun servers with FreeBSD on em. I think.

I would be interested in this too.