Lots easier than before. Off the top of my head:
1: You have more than enough 'power users' who keep their machines on 24/7 for torrent seeding. VirtualBox is free & those guys are fairly security conscious as a result of the inherent defensive nature of torrenting (MPAA litigation, etc). Give them a VBox server they can run and they'd happily do it. Now grandma can use his server no problem, in the same way that you only needed 1 techie in your group (pre-AOL) to host an SMTP server.
The real difficulty is convincing grandma that she needs to leave "AOL".
That is oversimplifying, for example what happens when Microsoft seems to make your email to your brother in-law disappear and they tell you they have no control over their spam filters? Or when you sent out birthday invites and every Yahoo user you know presents you with an automated message that your server has been banned forever from sending them mail? So you set out to get SPF records, get DKIM working, get certs... and it doesn't help.
Also, running torrents is different from getting all the DNS set up and forwarding all the ports. And even then, where I live, out of the 10 or so fiber providers I can choose, I know that only 2 allow me to do anything with port 25.
The real difficulty is convincing grandma that she needs to leave "AOL".