It is relatively easy to use your home computer running Windows to become a webserver that is accessible from anywhere. The following method is highly flexible and makes it possible to host websites, documents and files on that server and protect the contents with passwords if so desired. All you need is a software called XAMP which installs the Apache server environment on your computer.
Download Xamp for Windows and install it on your system. It does not matter if you install the modules as services, you can activate them as well by opening the control panel. (start apache) Once installed the webserver should be accessible by typing in http://localhost or http://yourdynamicip; You can look up your dynamic ip using my ip lookup script. Hosting files is as easy, just upload all the files that you want to share into the subfolder htdocs or create a subfolder and add the files to it.
Access the subfolder by appending /subfolder/ to the url that you want to access. You can add html and php files as well and those can be accessed as well similar to those files on other websites. It is easy to secure folders or the complete server using so called .htaccess files. Use the htaccess generator and add the generated files to your directories that you want to protect.
There is one last thing that can be optimized. It is difficulty for others to access your webserver if you have dynamic IPs. To counter this you could use a free service like DynDNS which adds a static dns to your IP. Friends and everyone else who should access the webserver can then use the dynamic dns which looks something like subdomain.dyndns.bz instead of the dynamic IP address.
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