By the way
You can host a site on your home computer. There's a technical difficulty though: most computers connect to the Internet using a dynamic IP address. More...
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IP address
Every server on the Internet is assigned a unique number known as an IP (Internet Protocol) address. Think of it as of a "telephone number" that allows other computers to find and access files regardless of their location.
Any IP address is 4 bytes (32 bits) with each byte is known as an octet. An octet can have a value between 0 and 255, so IP addresses are written in the form of 123.456.78.9.
In theory, this 32 bits format allows for over 4 billion unique addresses. In reality the actual number is much less. Certain ranges are reserved for special purposes so the number of available IP addresses is limited.
Use of shared hosting or virtual servers helps websites to get around this limitation. Shared hosting allows several sites, uniquely identified by their domain name (e.g. mydomain.com), to be hosted on the same server. Each of these sites has the same IP address.
The number of IP addresses can be expanded with the introduction of version 6 (We currently use version 4) of the Internet Protocol. IPv6 has 128 bits wide IP addresses providing an almost unlimited number of unique addresses. This will take a few years to implement due to the cost of the Internet infrastructure upgrade.
Shared hosting solves the problem of limited IP addresses for web sites. However each personal computer used to browse the web or send email also needs an IP address. To allow for this, Internet providers use a system of "dynamic addresses" - every time you connect to the Internet through a dial-up or DSL modem you are assigned a different IP address.