I would consider things like home movies and photo albums to be one of the main use-cases for a personal website (photo albums are pretty much what everyone in my social network uses Facebook for today). If you restrict to text websites, we could all get by with < 1Mb/s internet connections.
Backups are something else sure, but for personal hosting, the world is easier if you can just plop photos into a directory with maybe a simple html (or in my case xml) file and not deal with things like generating thumbnails or different quality settings.
Backups are something else sure, but for personal hosting, the world is easier if you can just plop photos into a directory with maybe a simple html (or in my case xml) file and not deal with things like generating thumbnails or different quality settings.