> how about just a machine with Apache sitting in the office hooked up to your office's business-SDSL line?

I don't consider that an option for real hosting. There are a lot of reasons why it is bad.

Internet: DSL, or whatever your office has in probably not that reliable, and single-homed (your ISP goes down, so do you).

Cooling: Offices are not designed to cool servers. The AC gets turned off at night and on weekends. Airflow is bad.

Power: Once you start running more than a few servers you will need to add special wall/roof mounted AC. The combined power of the servers and AC will cost you thousands per month.

Need: If you don't need more than a few servers, you don't need your own servers. It will cost less to rent a little space on someone else's server (VPS).

Hard: As the article says, "Hardware is hard." You have all the downsides of Condo and Manor, with none of the upsides. Power, cooling, out-of-band console, internet, networking, backups, provisioning, monitoring, the list goes on. And none of it will be to the quality of a datacenter. It's a lot of time and money for nothing.

"But ask not for whom the pager beeps — for sysadmin, it beeps for thee." I'm the sysadmin, and I don't want my pager going off because it's a three day weekend and the temperature in the server closet reached 120F (I've seen the temp reach 120F in about 30 minutes when the AC failed).