The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy an image and getting a Javascript alert telling you the image was "copyright". It was learning that you could copy it anyway if you spammed enter. It was hotlinking those same images in protest. It was waiting 5 hours to download a 37 second 320x240 RealPlayer video. It was having a password "protected" area where the password is base64 encoded in the source. It was trying the same search query in multiple search engines because they would return different results. It was typing random URLs in to see if you could find something interesting yourself. It was playing midi files on loop in the background. It was Macromedia Flash, explicit popups, pure yellow text on black backgrounds, and reformatting your computer to get rid of viruses.

The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.

I run my own blog on AWS for ~a dollar a month.