[fencepost]

I suspect that using your own domain for large volumes of photos still adds significant indirect time and energy cost of fiddling around with separate front end and mass storage backend. A bunch of time spent tweaking to keep full images and smaller versions organized and quick while not paying a premium for storage is a cost, and those hours have value.

[dexterdog]

I didn't mean hosting them yourself (which there are plenty of packages for) I mean using your own domain via CNAME on a service like smugmug.