Before Mountain Lion, a personal web server was available under System Preferences > Sharing > Web Sharing.
They removed the UI to enable it in Mountain Lion, but the functionality is still built in and can be enabled if you install Apple's MacOS Server app from the app store. Or you can just enable it from the command line.
It was a really nice idea. I wonder how often it got used. I think it was a conceptual relic of the [Jeff Goldblum era](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQmK1CnwOUI) of iMacs with instant Internet and personal webpages.
No, personal web pages have been replaced with Facebook accounts. Nobody wants or needs a website to show off photos and videos and personal updates anymore.
But nobody in the target audience will visit it, because it's some random website and not a Facebook page. So what good is a website that's never visited?
heh, remember when you could actually host your own website from your home connection on port 80? Dynamic DNS services, etc... ISPs put a quick end to that, though :(
Nowadays you need PAAS cloud hosting with Kubernetes on at least 3 servers, monitoring SAAS, log storage SAAS, CI for js transpilers, CDN for assets, Cloudflare, SSL certificate, checklist for PWA compliance, UX guidelines, AMP, OpenGraph metadata. Because best practices!
That's a strange way to look at things. You could argue the computer doesn't come started by default so it's not a security risk...
If there's an option to start it, it's a risk.
The next time there is a problem in Apache, the chances seem pretty high it will remain unpatched on macOS for weeks, if not months.