Advice needed - should I get a web host or host myself?

I'm getting pretty comfortable programming with WebSphere at work, and I think I'd like to try my hand at making a website myself for my hobby, one that would require SQL and other nontrivial things. I can make the J2EE .ear file that would work if it could be deployed somewhere.

It's for my hobby initially, though one day it could turn a very small profit. So the traffic is bound to be non-existent at first, but might get hundreds of users eventually.

What appservers (besides WebSphere) could run my WebSphere-created .ear file? I would guess they should all work?

If other appservers could run the .ear file, is it out of the question to just dedicate a machine at home to run something like Apache? If so, at the moment, I have RoadRunner residential service, not sure if I could keep using that...

Or should I just get a web hosting service? (Took a look but it seems I would have to learn a whole new set of development tools, plus it's extra $$).

Maybe others here are doing similar things that can share their experiences. Thanks!!

 

Hey, thanks to both of you. I googled myself silly trying to find the right way to ask for this information. There were not many jsp hosting solutions I found where you could at least have jsp's invoke Java code to do the work. That's a red flag to me that maybe I'm approaching this the wrong way.

Time Warner only offers static IP's with their business class, which is over double the price of their residential service.

Thanks for the do-it-yourself link, Mango - looks a bit daunting. I think I'll try looking into alternative technologies for serving up dynamic content, rather than J2EE. Something that will be a commonplace feature in most web hosts and most lend itself to a cheap web hosting solution. I am introducing myself to PHP at the moment, maybe that will be powerful enough. I'm good to go I think.