[duskwuff]

> the personal website that would be casually hosted whenever your PC is on

I don't think that was ever really a thing. Which isn't to say that no one did it, but it was never a common practice. And free web site hosting came earlier than you're implying - sites like Tripod and Angelfire launched in the mid-1990s, at a time when most users were still on dialup.

[robinsonb5]

People did indeed do that - and dynamic DNS didn't kill it, thanks to services like dyndns back when it was free.

[1718627440]

There are gratis DynDNS services?

[duskwuff]

There were in the early 2000s. They certainly didn't emerge as early as free web hosting, though.

[1718627440]

I meant that as a statement, that they are gratis today, paired with confusion, what they are talking about.

[foxrider]

Must be a regional thing, because where I live, mass internet adoption pretty much started in the 90s with the dedicated Ethernet connections. As such, every PC had its own IP address, it was a time before home routers. Later, the dreaded NAT was introduced, but the ISPs kept their "LAN" networks free. People hosted all sorts of things. It was a common practice for people to host an FTP server, a game server, an IRC and such on their home computers, and that "LAN" was not subject to the internet speed limit that was capped at around 600kb/s while the LAN would go as fast as the hardware allowed.

[account42]

That sounds like a very specific setup like a university dorm or perhaps managed apartment complex. But I doubt that was the norm for home internet connectivity anywhere, ever.

[Apocryphon]

Do you live in DARPA

[Apocryphon]

earliest of the three, GeoCities launched in 1994

[eterm]

For added context, geocities was started before Netscape Navigator was launched, and geocities was actually launched before Internet Explorer 1.0.