What was revolutionary about the blog 15 years ago was the comment system. In 2003 you couldn’t embed something like Disqus on your blog. If you wanted commenti

What was revolutionary about the blog 15 years ago was the comment system. In 2003 you couldn’t embed something like Disqus on your blog. If you wanted commenting, it had to be dynamic. The same with other features like trackbacks and pingbacks. And search. Upload speeds were also a consideration. If you wanted to update hundreds of pages and upload them all, that could take an afternoon. Finally, version control was far more clumsy than it is now. Subversion was basically the most advanced option out there, and there was no Github equivalent to host repositories. There was no S3 back then. $15/mo got you all-inclusive shared hosting at a flat rate, and it included PHP and MySQL whether you were going to use them or not. It wasn’t cheaper to host a static blog - at least not at the outset. Your average blog wasn’t pulling enough traffic to have any sort of resource problems even in shared hosting; and there were caching plugins you could install that could scale traffic if your site got popular. If that still wasn’t enough, you would get enough advertising to cover the cost of a VPS or maybe a managed dedicated server.