[z3t4]

More reasons why you do not have your own homepage ... discoverability: If there are no one linking to your webpage you do not exist. It's as Google broke the web by making a too good search engine. Most sites now a days is just a dead end, while web sites used to have lots of links that let you dig deeper into the subject. And instead of finding ten quality and peer-reviewed articles you now find thousand of crappy search-optimized articles.

Then there's the lock-in again. Instead of writing your web sites in pure HTML, they are now locked inside a database in some content management system. You can't simply move to another provider.

Also there's the domain names, or rather web addresses, they are too damn expensive. There need to be a free top level domain name so that web addresses stay longer then a year. Maybe only allow ten free domains per person to prevent hoarding.

[tdkl]

> Also there's the domain names, or rather web addresses, they are too damn expensive.

Really ? A year of a .com, .net, .org costs less then monthly internet bill.

Not to mention there have been many services offering subdomains of a rich domain list in the past.

I used them in the beginning of high school before finally buying a .net, putting it on a home DNS server with IPv6 tunnel and gain "l33t" points on IRC with a custom hostname.

[z3t4]

The domain cost is probably 90% of what it costs to host a web site. The problem with sub-domains is you have a weaker ownership and much higher risk compared to owning a .com domain, it's not like Verisign will shut down anytime soon and take all .com domains with them. I would be surprised if the sub domain you used in high-school still exists and links to your webpage. I also used to run a few web pages on free hosting in high-school, but they have been shut down a long time ago, so the links no longer works. But at least I still have some of the source code saved. After posting I found the .free TLD. I hope it will be like Letsenccrypt, but easier.