> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.magicpages.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A short history of the home page - URL: https://www.magicpages.co/a-press-of-your-own/a-short-history-of-the-home-page/ - Published: 2026-09-04T08:31:50.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-04T21:16:12.000Z - Description: Where independent publishers used to live, and where they live now - Author: Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki - Tags: #a-press-of-your-own In 1996 your address might have been **geocities.com/RodeoDrive/4021**. You didn’t choose the number. You chose a neighbourhood, because GeoCities was laid out like a town: Hollywood for entertainment, Area51 for science fiction, RodeoDrive for shopping. You picked a district, the system handed you a plot in it, and then you printed that whole string on the back of your zine and hoped people typed it correctly. You could have had a name of your own instead. Domains existed. In 1996 one company, Network Solutions, had the exclusive right to sell .com addresses and charged a hundred dollars for two years. So the choice was fifty dollars a year and some technical homework, or free and immediate. Almost everyone took free, and they were right to. But if you print things as well, you have a version of this problem that people who only publish online don’t. A dead link on a website is annoying: somebody clicks it, gets an error, searches your name, finds you anyway. A dead address on the back of a printed issue is permanent. Those copies are in people’s flats, in distro boxes, in a library in another country, and every one of them points at a place that now belongs to somebody else. You can correct a website in an afternoon. But you cannot correct three hundred printed copies. If you have ever applied for an ISSN, this is a problem you already know. You registered a permanent identifier so a librarian in thirty years could still work out what your magazine was, and you did it before the first issue rather than after the sixth. ## The price stopped being the reason in 1999 Network Solutions was sued in 1997 and dropped its price to seventy dollars for two years. Then, in 1998, a new nonprofit called ICANN took over the job of deciding who is allowed to sell domain names, and opened it to competitors. That ended the monopoly, and prices fell hard. By the end of 1999 the registries were charging six dollars a year for a name, and what people paid at the counter came down with them. It has stayed down ever since. In 2026 a .com is somewhere between ten and twenty euros a year, depending where you buy it and whether the price you were quoted was for the first year only. It costs a magazine with forty readers exactly what it costs a billion dollar enterprise. So owning your address never became impossible or expensive. It got cheap in 1999\. Free was still less work, yet its cost arrives so much later that it looks like bad luck rather than a decision. ## Two different things can be taken from you The story usually gets told in chapters: personal sites, then blogs, then platforms, then feeds, with each step handing a little more control to somebody else. That flattens two separate problems into one. One is who owns the software you write in. The other is who owns the address people find you at. They are not the same question, and they come apart in every combination. Three of the four have sections below. The fourth, your own software at somebody else’s address, is a Jekyll site on github.io: you keep every file, and they keep the name. Two questions, four combinations Who runs the software, and whose the address is. They are not the same question. their software · their address GeoCities, Splinder, Blog.pl, and Substack on substack.com their software · your address Substack with a domain attached; a managed Ghost or WordPress host your software · their address your own HTML on a GeoCities page; Jekyll or Hugo on github.io your software · your address Ghost or WordPress on a server you rent yourself Two things to own, not one. Lose the address and every printed copy is wrong. Lose the software and you move house, keeping the name. ## Their software, their address GeoCities, Splinder, and every free blog host since. Somebody else runs everything and your name sits inside theirs. Dada, the media group that owned Splinder, announced on 22 November 2011 that it would close ten weeks later. Splinder’s own front page was still counting that day: 707,867 blogs created since 2002\. Dada behaved decently and gave everyone an export file and a redirect from their old address to a new one. In contrast, when Onet and Wirtualna Polska closed Blog.pl and Bloog.pl in early 2018, they gave people the export and no redirect at all. If you only published online, the Blog.pl outcome costs you a few months of confused readers. If you had printed that address on the back of three hundred copies, some of them in libraries, the redirect is the difference between those copies still working and those copies being wrong forever. Nothing forced either decision. Somebody chose, in a meeting, and the people whose printed addresses were at stake were not in the room. ## Their software, your address A zine on Substack, or on a managed Ghost or WordPress host, with a domain of your own pointed at it. Somebody else runs the software, and the name people type is yours. It is older than people think. Blogger launched in August 1999, and for its first decade you could write in Blogger and have it push the finished pages onto a server of your own, at your own address. Google bought it in 2003 and switched that off on 1 May 2010, after which your blog lived at a blogspot.com subdomain unless you pointed a domain you owned at Google’s machines. The current version of the same exposure is quieter. Medium will let you put your own domain on a publication, and as of August 2026 its help pages say you need an active paid membership to keep it. You own the name. Whether the platform answers to it is their decision, renewed monthly. That is what going wrong looks like here, and it is survivable. The platform changes its terms, its prices, or what it is willing to host, and you keep the name and rebuild behind it. If what you care about is the address on the back of a printed issue, you can stop here. It solves that completely. A platform can throw you off tomorrow, and if the name is yours you can set the same address up somewhere else over a weekend, and all three hundred printed copies still work. The address is the part that print pins down. The software isn’t. It is not quite as simple as pointing, though. A domain only works somewhere that has agreed to answer to it, and that is the platform’s decision, not yours. Most paid plans allow it. Some charge extra, and Substack asks fifty dollars once. Some free tiers won’t do it at all. It is worth asking before you commit to anything. Get that right and every copy you have ever printed keeps working. Nothing else in here is necessary for that. One more difference only shows up on the day you leave. Anyone can download and run the software behind Ghost and WordPress, so a hosted account is one company among many running a copy of it for you. Leave, and you move the site to another company running the same software, and it works the same the next morning. Only Substack runs Substack, so going elsewhere means building the site again from scratch. You keep your writing and your subscribers’ email addresses, which for a newsletter is the part that matters. An afternoon against a project. I make my living from managed hosting for Ghost, so that argument happens to favour me. Discount it accordingly. ## Your software, your address Running the software yourself answers a different question, and it is not automatically better. It has more suppliers in it, not fewer. What it settles is who decides what happens to the tool you write in. On 13 May 2004, Mena Trott of Six Apart published the pricing for Movable Type 3.0\. Movable Type had been the serious publisher’s tool for three years, never open source but free enough: the site said there was no fee, though a donation was appreciated. Version 3.0 introduced licenses. The free one allowed one author and three weblogs. The paid ones started at $69.95 and capped weblogs too, at five, then eight, then ten. Six Apart was, Trott wrote, “fairly comfortable these licenses will meet the needs of over 85% percent \[sic\] of our current users.” Two hundred and sixty-seven replies from two hundred and thirty-six different blogs are attached to that post, timestamped between five in the morning and ten at night the same day. “Looks Like I’ll Be Dumping MovableType Soon.” “Movable Type RIP?” “And that’s the end of that.” The clearest was Mark Pilgrim’s, the next day, under the title “Freedom 0”: > With Movable Type 2.6, I was allowed to run 11 sites. In 3.0, that right will cost me $535\. It’s not about money; it’s about freedom. Six Apart retreated over the following two years and open-sourced the whole thing in December 2007\. People had already gone. They could go because the software was theirs to move: WordPress 1.0, released on 3 January 2004, four months before any of this, already shipped an importer for Movable Type. It happened again in August 2005, when twenty of Mambo’s core developers walked out over who controlled the project. Mambo was run by an Australian company, and when that company set up a new foundation the developers judged it handed control to the company rather than to them. They took the code, because the license let them. They could not take the name, which the company owned, so they picked a new one and called it Joomla. Mambo’s last release was in 2008\. Joomla shipped version 6.1.2 in July 2026. In November 2012, John O’Nolan wrote that WordPress “no longer has a purpose. It’s no longer for anything specific, it’s for everything you can imagine doing with it,” and proposed building something that was only a publishing tool. He called it Ghost. The Kickstarter he ran the following spring closed on 28 May 2013 with £196,362 from 5,236 backers, most giving ten or twenty-five pounds. He promised on the campaign page, before the organisation existed, that it would be a non-profit. Ghost is run by a non-profit foundation registered in Singapore, set up with no shares and no shareholders. In its own words, its constitution “ensures that the company can never be bought or sold”. TYPO3, a content management system which a great many German agencies grew up on, is held by a non-profit association in Switzerland. Both settled the ownership question in their paperwork rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be in charge. Neither has an owner who could sell it, whatever the people currently running them might want. ## Why there was anywhere to go WordPress exists because of a man in Corsica having a bad year. Michel Valdrighi started b2/cafelog in June 2001, on dial-up. He put it under a license that let anyone copy and continue it. His reason, in his own words: “I didn’t want the code to end up abandoned and forgotten because of the choice of an exotic license.” Then in May 2002 he lost his job. After that came depression, health problems, and at one point the electricity being cut off. His last post was December 2002. On 24 January 2003 a nineteen-year-old in Houston wrote: > My logging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay. What to do? Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork. That was Matt Mullenweg. Mike Little answered the next afternoon and offered to help. Two people, which is what it took to start the software that in 2026 runs about two in five websites. The license Valdrighi chose so his work wouldn’t be abandoned is the exact reason it wasn’t, at the moment he couldn’t carry it himself. ## It really was harder None of that would matter if running your own installation stayed the preserve of people who enjoy wrangling servers, and for a long time it did. The difficulty fell away in pieces, years apart. Keeping a site patched was a manual job until WordPress switched on automatic security updates in October 2013\. Certificates cost money and were installed by hand until Let’s Encrypt opened in December 2015. Managed hosting sold a paid shortcut through those middle years, from WordPress.com VIP at $250 a month in 2006 to Ghost’s own hosting at $5 in 2013. ## What none of it protects you from In September 2024, a dispute between the hosting company WP Engine and Automattic, the company Mullenweg went on to found, ended with WP Engine losing access to the plugin and theme update servers. Those servers are part of WordPress.org, which despite the name is neither Automattic’s nor a foundation’s: Mullenweg controls it personally. Sites belonging to people with no part in the argument stopped getting updates. In December a court ordered Mullenweg and Automattic to restore access. So there is always somebody upstream, and no arrangement puts you outside everybody’s reach. What running your own installation gets you is more modest, and it is exactly what publishing has always meant by independence: you choose your suppliers, and you can change them without losing what you made. ## Why people still don’t do it I had domains in 2005\. My first website was for my local scout group, built in Microsoft Publisher and long since gone. After that came a stack of Joomla sites about everything and nothing, then hand-written HTML, then a few years trying and failing to make a living building WordPress sites. I paid for hosting. I knew what a DNS record was. And then for most of a decade I published on other people’s platforms, because that is where the people were. So the reason has nothing to do with money or difficulty, and I don’t believe there is an argument that changes it. A platform hands you readers on the first day. Your own address hands you an empty room and a renewal date. Anyone telling you the choice is obvious isn’t being straight with you. This history won’t talk anybody into anything. What it can do is tell you which arrangement you are in, which is worth knowing before somebody else decides to change it. Especially if you have already printed the address.