Like many, you have a fast broadband connection serving you 24/7. This service is probably underused, particularly if you have a fast connection and work and, when you get home, you don’t want to spend all your time on the net.

When you connected up to your broadband service, you were probably offered some free web space for your own homepage. Designed for nothing more than a personal presence online, the free space will not be enough to backup data, host your photo collection or enable file downloads for your friends. There are many cheap hosting providers, but you have to spend your time uploading your data to their services, if you need to make changes, which takes time. Uploading on broadband connection is slow.

The other option is to turn your broadband connection in to your own file serving service. There’s no reason why you can’t provide your latest holiday photos online, as a downloadable file, or even an ISO image of your latest holiday home movie. Your friends, family and other colleagues can then download at their own leisure.

Quick n Easy FTP Server is a commercial FTP server that you could install on a spare computer and then use this computer as your own home server. You could then set up login/pass info for the people you want to connect, depending on their requirements. You can block users, monitor their IP address and connection and much more.