It's interesting how people used to do this back in ~2005 but now don't, however nowdays computers are much much faster and stronger than they were in 2005 so it aught to have become more feasible since a normal laptop should be akin to a small cluster back in those days.
I have a web server in the corner of my room since the beginning of 2004.
Besides being a firewall/router/switch and hosting a web server, it hosts more than a dozen other services, including an e-mail server, NTP server, DNS servers, DHCP & TFTP servers, etc.
In 18 years it did not have any down time, except for a few minutes every 3 to 5 years, when I have upgraded the hardware.
I could have upgraded the hardware less frequently, but I have replaced it whenever I could reduce the power consumption without decreasing the performance.
Now it is at the 6th hardware version. It has started as a big Pentium 4 pedestal server consuming over 200 W, but until now it has been reduced to an Intel NUC with a 4.5 GHz 4-core Coffee Lake U CPU, together with 4 USB to Ethernet adapters used to increase the number of Ethernet ports to 5, consuming not much above 10 W, while being much faster than the oldest servers.
A laptop has the advantage of incorporating an UPS, but I would not trust most of them with working 24/7 for years, like an Intel NUC, or preferably some fanless small computer (with an external UPS).
>In 18 years it did not have any down time, except for a few minutes every 3 to 5 years, when I have upgraded the hardware.
I wish I had that reliable of a power source. Even with a UPS, I've had tornados, snowpocalypse, etc where the power loss has lasted longer than any UPS I have.
I'm more impressed by the internet connection. Mine is down for at least a few minutes every week. And that's only counting when I'm at home to notice it.
Though I am an individual user, I have paid since the beginning for a "business" internet connection, in order to obtain some (8) static public IPv4 addresses.
It has cost me about $60 per month, which is significantly more than non-business connections of similar speed (currently around 400 Mb/s) cost around here.
Paying for a business connection has been the main expense for having my own e-mail and web server. Except for the first server, all the later upgrades have been done by reusing computers that had been originally bought and used for other purposes. With the quickly declining power consumption of the newer servers, the cost of the electrical energy has become negligible.
A Raspberry Pi is not a good choice for a firewall/router and/or Web server, but there are small computers similar in size and price, e.g. NanoPi R5S (fanless and with 3 Ethernet ports, including two of 2.5 Gb/s for LAN and one of 1 Gb/s for WAN; 2 USB ports can be used to increase the number of Ethernet ports to 5), which should be good enough for most people.
I have power interruptions from time to time, but fortunately they are not long.
Now, with only an Intel NUC connected to an UPS that could power a big server for a half hour, the NUC might work for a day from the UPS without having to shut down.
Where I live, the "snowpocalypses", which were frequent when I was a child, have disappeared completely. On the other hand, tornadoes, which were completely unknown previously, have started to appear, so they might become a cause of problems in the future.
It's also easier and faster to make your own butter today than it was 100 years ago, but most people don't because it's even easier to just buy some at the store.
Thing about a laptop - I am not going to keep it running 24/7. So I probably want to buy another computer for the hosting. And by that point it is cheaper to use a free netlify/github hosting type thing. You have to be quite motivated to run your own. Even in 2005 there was very cheap shared hosting, I wouldn't have chosen to self host unless it is for hobby/experimentation reasons.
