Memory can be foggy but the most useful were hosted on university pages or random folders off a random domains or you get a subdomain. I picked the username 'search' which gave me search.batcave.net which worked great until one day they just took over the subdomain for a site wide search. They were confused when I complained.

Sure people hosted on geocities and tripod and they were the biggest and easiest to remember. But quality of a geocities page compared to a mit student page was much lower.

20 years ago, it was extremely common for your ISP to give you 5MB or whatever of space to use. users.ispname.com/~yourname or whatever. It was great, tbh, since anyone with cuteftp and notepad could publish to the world.

Still common now, at least in Australia. My ISP gives me 1GB if hosting for a website and 10 mailboxes.