A home server is a server that is located in a private residence providing services to other devices inside or outside the household through a home network or the internet. Such services may include file and printer serving; media centre serving, web serving, web caching, account authentication and backup services. Because of the relatively low number of computers on a typical home network, a home server commonly does not require significant computing power. These are servers are generally free of congestion and are faster compared to the External Servers. Home servers run on many different operating systems. Enthusiasts who build their own home servers can use whatever OS is conveniently available or familiar to them, such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris or BSD.

The Home Servers provides various services. Some of the most important services provided by the home servers are mentioned here –

Centralized Storage: Home servers often act as network-attached storage providing the major benefit that all users’ files can be centrally and securely stored, with flexible permissions applied to them. The files are put in a shared drive which is password protected and can be accessed using any computer connected to the network.

Media Serving: Home servers are often used to serve multi-media content, including photos, music, and video to other devices in the household. Using standard protocols such as DLNA or proprietary systems such as iTunes users can access their media stored on the home server from any room in the house. Some home servers provide remote access to media and entertainment content.

E-Mail: Many home servers also run e-mail servers that handle e-mail for the owner’s domain name. The advantages of e-mail servers are having much bigger mailboxes and maximum message size than most commercial e-mail services. The access to the server is much faster than any external servers. This also increases security as e-mails do not reside on an off-site server.