I think hosting a website in a low powered computer like Raspberry Pi can be an alternative to really own our platform. Granted, it can't handle big traffic, but it is cheap enough to built and maintain yourself.
That is why the dot com era was more fruitful. People started in their basement, and service outages were not a big deal... Heck, service outages were often the thing that spurred more interest in products and also spurred users to invest so that products could scale.