My home box as my own host?

Question

I have a 512 kb/s DSL service at home. I do not have a static IP but I can get one if I pay some extra to my ISP.

Now, if I get the static IP, can I make my home box act as my internet host? What else do I need?

P.S. I know that if at all possible, the site I make available this way might be slow, that is alright, my question is if it is possible at all.

Edit:
I need this for very small traffic. I am a PHP developer and for my projects I am often asked to provide a demo. I currently use a free hosting for this purpose but it is down most of the time and support is non-existent. So I thought to set-up my home computer as my test server.

With this please note that:

1. I will only occasionally have 'visitors' and that will be one or possibly two visitors at any time.
2. These demos, are to showcase functionality, so no big images are served and page views will normally generate under 100KB of traffic.

Answer 1

A static ip address is not a neccessity. You can host your own email\web\ftp\etc server with a dynamic ip address in conjunction with a dynamic DNS service, such as DynDns.

Answer 2

First you need to decide what you want to host. A web site? Email? A high-performance compute cloud?

If it's just a simple web site, yes, then you can install some flavor of Linux (or you can use Windows, somehow a quick Ubuntu LAMP install seems about right in this case) including Apache as a web server.

You'd need to choose and register a domain name and - probably through the registrar - arrange for a DNS entry for the name to point to your static IP.

And Bob's your uncle!

Answer 3

It's certainly possible to do this, but it might be more trouble than it's worth. If you just want to host a web site, you can get a deal from one of the big web hosting providers such as Dreamhost, GoDaddy or FatCow that will probably cost about the same as paying your ISP the extra money for a fixed IP address.