If you are new to this than you would be crazy to go down the road of setting up a home server and be fine. Judging from many of Greeks posts, he is very technically savvy and could be fine doing it, but for most it is a different story.
Even with the technical know-how to setup a server, you have to make sure you don’t bog it down (like if you were using it as your home PC as well), then what happens when you go on vacation and your server hiccups or the power goes out in your home and your site is down for a week. You will get dropped out of the search engines because they can’t find you, you will miss that whale that was looking for your site. There are plenty of really cheap hosting options out there for as little as $5 per month where you have guaranteed up-time, backup systems, and of couse all of the nice features you would want for hosting your site that will cost you time and money to set up on your own to use.