Is it easy to set up a home server?

[Jake Horsfield]

It depends, if you are wanting to set up a web server for personal use e.g. testing, then it should be okay, but if you're wanting to set up a web server to run a website with regular traffic, then you'll run into problems as your hardware won't be good enough.

Another thing to think about is your ISP. I doubt that you'll be allowed to run a web server from your current plan with your ISP, you'll have to upgrade which will cost A LOT of money.

If you're planning on running a website which you want people to visit on a regular basis, I'd recommend that you just buy hosting. This way, it would be much cheaper, you wouldn't need a PC running 24/7 and you'll be more relaxed as there won't be a ton of problems you need to fix.

[MyDigitalpoint]

You can set up a home server for testing purposes in your computer and it is really easy to do, matter to unpack the distro package and run the installation program.

However a home server of this characteristics is not an Ubuntu servers and must not be used as production server, this is, making it live for Internet surfers because a computer cannot do efficiently this job.

Probably the most known and used home server softwares is XAMPP from Apache Friends, which can run over Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris, but there are other computer-based servers that you can find listed in HotScripts, just use the search function.

For XAMPP, this is the link, www.apachefriends.org