Another reason for a home server ...

Digital Railroad, a hosted digital archiving and commerce site, used by professional photographers abruptly shut down its web site.  If you need a place to archive large collections of digital photos that you want complete control of .... then perhaps a Windows Home Server powered solution is a better choice.

You can read more about the story on Janice Chen's article.  Below is one of my favorite parts ...

All of this raises the question of how safe it is to rely on online photo sharing sites to store and back up your images, especially in light of the current economic mess we’re in. If we haven’t learned a lesson from the last time the dot-com bubble burst, now’s the time. While photo sites are still a great place to share and print photos, you’d be smart to keep multiple backups of your photos, online and off.  In my household we use redundant external hard drives and cycle the data onto newer drives on an ongoing basis. It’s not always an ideal solution, but so far it’s been working for us.

Anybody care to educate Janice about the power of Windows Home Server?

t.