My first pages were on my ISP which offered a subdomain! I paid £2 a month extra (on top of call charges) for the privelige. My friends thought I was crazy but I showed them when that very same subdomain impressed someone enough to give me a web dev job ("You have a subdomain? Impressive").

I also looked down on geocities/angelfire sites and I still think I got the better deal out of it - my first stuff was too embarrassing to live on for eternity in the depths of a torrent.