You have broadband, but what is your up and down bandwidth numbers? Mine is 4mbit/4mbit, and I didn't notice a slow down, when I was essentially slashdotted on a smaller scale, when I had ~10 connections a minute downloading a 1.5MB file. And this 10 connection a minute stuff happened over the course of ~5 hours. In that time, I moved about 600MB of data -- ~30KB/s or 1/16th of my total bandwidth average. Over the next few days I moved about 300MB each day. My bandwidth that month came to 3.5GB. It was a small enough fraction of my overall bandwidth (speed) I didn't notice it at all.

I host myself, and recommend GoDaddy for Domain Name. I use DNSPark for DNS hosting.


I voted not secure, BTW. I voted this because I'd recommend using some spare computer for being the webserver and everything. This prevents user error on your part, such as accidentally opening an unsafe e-mail attachment that had a virus, from messing up your server. It also sorta prevents your server from messing up your computer deep down where it hurts. I know for IIS, I've seen some evidence of scripts trying to format the computer's HDD.

So if you are going to do hosting on your computer, Apache is your best bet. For regular (static) web pages this is great. If you do PHP or PERL, the PHP/PERL puts your computer at risk of more things. So think strongly before running active stuff on your server. BUT NEVER CONSIDER IIS -- Unless you are doing stuff in a corporate network that requires features MS built into IIS, and you are willing to shell out $5,000 for a licence (OS mainly) that only can only come with a $10,000 computer you won't be able to get ahold of a reasonable copy of IIS to use anyways... I'm exagerrating, but choose Apache if you go ahead and do this.


BTW, some ISPs specifically say in their usage agreements that you are not allowed to host servers like webservers, etc., on your Internet connection. You'll want to check that out, or they might revoke your ability to connect to the Internet until you call them and sort it out...