I think there's some rose colored glasses here about the "good ole days" where everyone had a personal site. In 1999 almost everyone's so called "personal site" was hosted by either Yahoo (Geocities) or Lycos (Angelfire/Tripod).
In fact most ISPs offered free web hosting and an email account, with optional domain naming, as part of their deal.
Geocities and Tripod were prominent but they were a long way from being the only option.
And the hosting usually allowed CGI and PHP and often included shopping carts and other ready-made services. So it was ridiculously easy and cheap to set up a small business if you wanted to - or just create some basic pages if you didn't.
