>>In the olden days, when the web was new, even just getting a domain of your own could be a somewhat daunting process

Not to mention expensive. I 'owned' a couple of domains through that period, and it was a few hundred dollars a year - per domain.

It was also expensive to 'own' an IP address (in the sense of it being a static address, something your ISP wouldn't just change overnight) - or the feature was just unavailable to residential addresses. This is pretty much why Dynamic DNS got invented - but it hadn't been, yet.