Back in 2009, anynone with a Nokia could have a personal website running on their own phone. Sadly this amazing piece of tech was never widely adopted. Today’s phone are far more powerful than those Nokias both in performance and battery backup and still we don’t see anyone running a server on their phone. Why?
I think this was never implemented on phones because there’s no incentive for large corporations to work on something like this.
I use a dumb phone for that, and due to my provider’s oversight, I get 1 MB for free a day on a prepaid card, enough for basic stuff like train timetables on Opera Mini (no email due to privacy concerns but I am frequently enough on Wi-Fi anyway). So I carry two phones: my smartphone has no SIM card and is used most of the time while my Nokia lasts a week while in standby.
So neither phone could work as a server, nor would most of anyone else’s given that everyone expects 100% uptime, which phones don’t really provide.
However, how about using one of the three rooted Android 4.4 phones in my drawer? My home Wi-Fi, a USB charger and a root app that runs a remotely maintainable web server would make it a great website hosting option. Sadly, I don’t know any Java and few people develop for Android versions before 5, among other things because of its bring-your-own-TLS-1.2-implementation necessity.