The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and its Amendments sets regulations applicable to all community water systems that have 15 or more service connections and/or serve at least 25 people. At first glance, this may appear most inclusive, but in reality there are numerous private homeowners, non-community, and transient populations potentially at risk to contaminated drinking water. In addition, the tens of thousands of very small community systems (approximately 500 population served) currently regulated have little chance of complying with the ever increasing number of regulated contaminants or instituting Best Available Technology (BAT). Their problems are well documented as is the lack of resources to correct those problems. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to provide a practical overview to the 'little guy' attempting to provide safe drinking water. The overview will present the advantages, disadvantages, and costs of several treatment technologies focusing on those aspects of cost, reliability, and ease of operation for those technologies that make them more amenable to package plant and Point-of-Use/Point-of-Entry (POU/POE) operation rather than traditional full-scale central treatment plants.