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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

RIP the once-common practice of having a personal website (that would have a free host)

The "free" hosts were already harbingers of the end times. Once, having a dedicated IP address per machine stopped being a requirement, the personal website that would be casually hosted whenever your PC is on was done.

> 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.

earliest of the three, GeoCities launched in 1994

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

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.

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.

Do you live in DARPA

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

There are gratis DynDNS services?

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

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

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