Is it possible to make your own server?

You can use any old computer to create a server.

I don’t know how much sense it makes. Yes, it is cool to have your own server. You have your own security (at least physical one), you don’t pay for the fees and you have zero latency. After all, the server is on your LAN.

But …

Computers opened 24 / 7 tends to consume a lot of power. It requires a permanent Internet connection. It takes space. If it is a real server (as in dedicated equipment), it tends to be a bit loud.

For companies, it makes sense, especially if you use it a lot. But if you want to save money on hosting, I think that the added costs of running it will be a lot higher than just using a off the shelf solution.

At the end of the day, companies like Namecheap and Hostgator leverage entire server farms to provide solutions to you and me. You can get a dedicated server, a Xeon E3, with 8 GB of RAM, 500 GB and 10 TB of bandwidth for 44 Pounds /month. This kind of hardware + the electricity + the connection itself would cost a lot more than this payment.

The economy of scale employed by a large hosting provider gives you a very good deal as opposed to doing this yourself.

I’ve actually ran a server for a while. I took it off since it was more of a hobby project than anything else.

If you want hosting and you are not concerned about security so much (this is a major advantage of hosting it, you set your own security rules), you have many options out there:

Shared hosting - cheap but functional.
Business hosting - a small upgrade.
VPS - actually a big improvement in performance.
Dedicated servers - options from running an email server to pseudo-super computing.
Cloud - my favorite. Services like Amazon AWS will help you get almost exactly what you need and can scale easily. If your needs increase tenfold by tomorrow, cloud based solutions are the best choice and in 99 / 100 cases, a lot better than hosting a server in your own house.