Are you kidding? Websites aren't free, especially the closed-source ones. [1] Ask my clients. Websites can be very cheap, provided your entire vision of web pu

Are you kidding? Websites aren't free, especially the closed-source ones. [1] Ask my clients. Websites can be very cheap, provided your entire vision of web publishing is stuck in 1995: a bunch of $5/month web hosts full of cookie-cutter blogs that will fall over every time they get linked by anyone. But good web hosting costs money. Good web software with any custom feature whatsoever costs much, much more money. Designers cost money, and cost the time required to find them. Google are masters of the art of making ad-supported websites feel "free", but Google operates at massive scale, milking a giant cash cow whenever they need to support a loss leader for a while. Most other free sites come with very strict limitations: If their traffic drops below a certain point, they cease to be financially viable, whereupon they only last as long as a publisher is willing to pour time and money into them with no hope of return. That leads to phenomena like SEO-oriented blogs whose authors write with one eye firmly fixed on their ad traffic. Those are fine, in their role, but there are times when one wants something different. -- [1] That's "free as in beer". There are many websites built entirely on free software, of course, but those fail your first criterion.