Website hosting

There are stacks of website hosts out there nowadays offering great deals from about two or three dollars a month upwards, but did you know you can host your own site for nothing?
You would normally pay for a domain name and a host, but if you add some free server software (such as Apache) to your hard drive, you can configure it to behave as a host using your IP address instead of a domain name.
You may have noticed quite a few disreputable sites use this method so that a host cannot remove their website which will be selling fake goods or medications or worse....
So I'm not recommending this method especially as it will mean that your computer will have to be online all the time and will have to cope with any traffic that visits your site. In fact it's probably quite a bad idea, but I wonder if you knew that this could be done?

Please note, you should never click on a link that has an IP address instead of a URL, unless you know exactly where it points to. However, you could use this method for acessing files from home from another site (but be aware that anyone else could too!)