Comment by torginus

When this was a thing that people used, there were tons of free services (in the style of geocities) that offered the same basic functionality (often with a paid tier that was a bit more functional).

They gave you a sub url, like mypage.hostingsite.com and ftp access where you could upload like 50mb of data.

I remember running my website in high school, and so did a ton of people, a significant number of whom I wouldn't describe as particularly technical.

I think my ISP offered a similar service but it was both less generous and much harder to use. I don't think a lot of people of people used those.

If you needed/wanted more, you could use your old crappy PC to host a webserver - just install a LAMP stack, phone your ISP to give you a static IP, and buy a domain from your pocket money.

One of my friends used to run a somewhat popular PhpBB based Counter-Strike forum, and even caused some noteworthy drama online, when his parents unplugged the PC because they said it was using too much power , and the forum was down for like a week.