[cr0sh]

My ISP (cox) blocks ports 80 and 25, and probably others. Also, in the TOS it explicitly states that running servers is prohibited, and could result in termination of services.

The first is mainly done - from what I understand - to combat spam and other nefarious things; to keep people from running malicious web sites, and/or hosting spamming mail servers or whatnot.

But the second is more of an "implied threat"; for the most part, they don't really care if you run a server off some other port, use some kind of DNS discovery service, etc - provided it has low usage, and isn't doing anything against their other terms in the TOS.

So basically, hobby sites or similar stuff are allowed to run; part of the reason of this is because there is (or was) a lot of software (games mainly - if I understand right - but other platforms too) that were essentially servers, and became popular with people. Plus you had things like home VOIP, media servers, etc - that people used and liked. So they kinda let some things "fly under the radar" of their TOS.

But they never removed the language from the document.

...and so, that Sword of Damocles is left hanging over our head as a threat: "Don't get too popular...it'd be a pity if something happened to your system".

[anderspitman]

There seems to be plenty of healthy competition in the VPS space. I agree being able to host from home would be nice as an option, but in reality upload bandwidth usually isn't good enough for anything I'd want to host anyhow.