I have run a little home server for the past 3 or 4 years. Use it to handle mail, dns, some web sites (nothing commercial), and as an ftp server.
It runs on an old P3 box and it has never had any problems.
I'm running viking server
http://www.robtex.com/viking.features.html which is very unix like but it is not quite the same as apache
Have a good friend that runs sites from home using apache inside of windows and has had no probs there either.
I would not run any high traffic commercial sites from home.
I have statics from swbell dsl but only got them because I wanted to run the server.
I learned a shit load through setting it all up