Suppose it’s the early 2000s. Remember those (allegedly oh-so) glorious days? Suppose you’d like to make your very own website. Perhaps you’d seen the beautiful sites others have created and want one of your own. You could buy a domain name for a dozen or so dollars a year (and still can).
The issue is that you have to have somewhere to point that domain name. A place to put your site! For many of us (and a lot of us were quite young back then), the quest for hosting space would become a major motivating factor in our webweaving journey.
Back then, it was actually (if my recollections are right) somewhat more expensive to host most things. Nowadays, you can easily toss a site onto neocities with no advertisements (for an extra $5 a month if you want to use a domain name), or several other services for a similar fee.
Back in the Before Times, any free service would’ve forcibly plastered your site with advertisements. This was all complicated by the fact that not all web hosts (then and now) allow you to use a domain name. So, the search for hosting wasn’t easy in the 2000s…
This led to the development of an ad hoc system where some people acted as (free!) hosts for others who were hostees. In other words, people would share their (already shared) hosting accounts with others in the same cultural niche. Sometimes the hosts or hostesses would provide the hostees with a full subdomain and email address, sometimes not. In many cases, having hostees broke the terms and conditions of paid hosting accounts, but people still did it, creating little fiefdoms of shared virtual space. Often, you couldn’t use your own domain name when acting as a hostee.
Many hosts put strange requests on hostees, too. I recall one person in the 2000s commenting that while she meant no harm by it, she wouldn’t host anyone who didn’t like her preferred ship (pairing of characters) from the medical drama television show ER.
Others committed to only hosting other women, gamers, musicians, or LGBTQ folks, or folks who shared similar interests in a more general fashion. While there were a lot of people with domain names and fresh hosting accounts ready to act as hosts, there were way more hostees. Hosts could, therefore, afford to be picky. That had both positive and negative aspects. Entire directories sprang up to help hostees find hosts.
Hosting from one of these individuals acting as hosts on a personal hosting account was chancy for other reasons, too. A lot of these people were teenagers, and sometimes struggled to pay for those commercial hosting accounts. When those died, so did the spaces set aside for any darling hostees. In those cases, hostees usually moved between hosts regularly, often changing URLs frequently if they didn’t have their own domain name.
Slowly, I made my way through various servers. Geocities is way overly-romanticized and nostalgized on sites like neocities. The same is true of similar services like Tripod and Angelfire. I used all of those at one point or another. Can’t be sure what they’re like now, if anything at all, but back then, that sort of site would forcibly insert a huge advertising banner or frame onto your site. On Geocities itself, the advertisement was a small popup that didn’t interfere with the layout initially, but this wasn’t true for all the services, nor at all instances.
AOL Hometown was my first blush of online presence, but at that point, I was about eight. I would eventually jump to Geocities as a preteen, and then to a plethora of other options, including many different personal setups. It wasn’t until my sweet sixteen that I got my own paid-for hosting, but prior to that, I had some neat adventures, of course. I sought webspace on servers like Freedom2Surf (one of the few that briefly had no advertisements), and, of course, on the aforementioned individual webspaces.
At one point, I found someone who would host me, and through that, met another girl, named Trish. Trish and I became fast friends, bonding over (bad, and I mean just terrible) CSS and HTML, as well as our favorite television shows (The X-Files and others). My site at the time was, and had been for years, airplane-themed, though. I didn’t post about airplanes, but the layout, colors, and site design all had an airplane ambiance and resemblance.
I don’t remember why I thought that was a good idea, but I thought it was a quaint and cute metaphor. Trish’s site changed much more frequently, but at the time, her design featured technicolor goldfish swimming through psychedelic nebulae in space. We were having a lot of fun. I don’t doubt that many other unique and beautiful friendships evolved out of this culture, even if not all of them lasted.
Sadly, that lasted about two months before Aaron, the guy who had agreed to host both of us, decided otherwise. What happened? Well, given the way being a hostee worked, we all had access to each other (and the host’s) stuff. And someone deleted Aaron’s entire CGI-bin, a crucial part of his own website. He gave Trish and I (specifically) the boot, operating under the assumption that we’d been the ones to have done it.
He deduced this because of some kind of disagreement he was having with Trish over the Second Iraq War. Such was life, and the pickiness people could afford with their webspace? He deleted both of our sites, completely and without warning, and told us off. This kind of thing was common, and we all just kind of coped with it when it happened. It was an accepted part of the “domain” subculture as such.
When I turned sixteen, I got a prepaid credit card for my birthday, specifically to use for purchasing hosting space online. This was the common approach parents were using at the time, and many of my online friends had already received a similar gift. Using the card, I was able to pay for a year of hosting, a minuscule amount of space (by current standards) on a shared server with few amenities.
It was just enough, though, for what I wanted to do, and I was more than grateful for it. It broke the strange cycle I’d been in of logging onto other people’s webspace as a hostee only to make a misstep and get the boot, or have the entire site vanish beneath me when the host did. I briefly considered taking on hostees of my own since I suddenly had webspace, but the amount I’d gotten was only enough for me, really, and I was happy with it.
Now, on neocities, I see people frightened to use the webspace they’ve been given, hotlinking to other sites and such. This creates a mess when those sites go down or when things load inconsistently! Just don’t do it unless you have to! I hotlink to music in archives sometimes, because that’s presumably what archives are there for, but I see no reason people should be doing any hotlinking with images. You’re getting a lot of webspace from places like neocities, actually. Just use it. I promise most images and files you need will fit. If the images are too big, you can try optimizing them, or using another image instead, or… okay, rant over.
Just be grateful for what we have now… those psychedelic goldfish of Trish’s would’ve adored swimming in the ponds provided by your average modern host, not worrying about hopping from place to place and being deleted constantly. This is particularly true since most don’t shove advertisements directly onto your own content, and many even feature social aspects. The latter was almost never part of the previous “domain” subculture except in those instances where ad hoc communities formed around those little individuals acting as hosts.
While the social media-esque attributes of hosts like neocities remain controversial in and of themselves, they’re a positive (in my opinion) replacement for the small fiefdom-like circles of hostees. While I loved the “domain” subculture back then, the “hostee” groups were never very strong nor healthy. It’s also clear that the crowd nowadays on sites like this (and the crowd holding personal domains in general) has aged quite a bit. We have more disposable income, and therefore fewer advertisements pop up overall, plus there’s less of a need for those circles of hostees.
That said, a disaffection with social media certainly fueled a return to keeping your own website over the past few years. This will probably continue into the late 2020s. If social media were still usable by people like me, it might be different, but it’s just not and I can’t quite qualify what I mean by “not usable by people like me.”
I do poke around Facebook (the most ancient places) occasionally, and will drift through Reddit, but it’s hard to communicate on some of those platforms because I don’t understand quite what they’re becoming. Plus, they’re so, so drab to behold, with mere white backgrounds, black text and bland buttons. I’d hope sites like neocities can successfully blend social features with pure hosting, but we’ll see.
Either way, people are moving back towards personal sites, just as they did in the 2000s. The technology (and the space) is there, ready to meet them in ways that it wasn’t before. Technology has caught up a bit, allowing us more freedom to experiment even in free webspace with mere CSS and Javascript. In many ways, the major changes in the domain subculture have been just as one would expect given the turning gears of time.