I was thinking of using it as a web server for my side projects. And if a project gets some traction I’ll move it to DigitalOcean or Heroku first thing.
Does that kind of setup make sense at all? What should I know before I begin?
Once you get past the lamers-following-scripts "customer service" reps, it's surprisingly easy to get a static IP, even a static IPv6 address, from major ISPs. I haven't done this with Comcast, but Centurylink was easy. You may have to buy "business class" service. Comcast will want you to run their router so they can have yet another "Xfinity" wireless access point leeching off your bandwith to them.
You have to pay extra for DNS, which always seems odd to me, like it's a scam for domain name registrars to make extra money.
Your machine will be probed mercilessly. Nearly 100% of SMTP traffic is spam. Way more than half of HTTP traffic is bots. Put ssh on something other than port 22, put a honey pot or tar pit (endlessh is good) on port 22. Occasionally you'll get DDoSed for no reason you can figure out.
If you ignore the issue of speed, and reliability, it should work just fine. But honestly it is probably better to host elsewhere. A single cheap VM could host 20+ websites/projects so incrementally adding another is essentially free.
Having offsite backups, monitoring, etc. Would be a lot easier to achieve with a commercial provider.
I use duckdns to deal with my broadband providers DHCP.
I use the same type of containers in test as live and just git push between them. Live is a cloud server with a bare git repo which checks out files to a public folder on receive.
Although my box is 10yrs old it has an hp remote control feature. Saves me getting out the loft ladder :-)
having a httpd covering file shares is so useful for so many reasons like this that i would always recommend it.