> We were providing free services decades ago.
That was then.
Now VPS providers are significantly increasing prices (Due to memory shortage) making it unaffordable to run servers cheaply.
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Servers, and memory, are orders of magnitude cheaper today than they were decades ago... for memory see: https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html
Yes there's a slight upwards blip right now, but not even close to cancelling decades of progress in price reduction.
Yet absolute price per GB isn't the full story when the popular tools accessible for the general public require more RAM for the same task today as compared to the past. You won't get far using the latest version of MS Word on a desktop with specs from 1999, or running MS Word 97 to edit academic essays turned this year.
Even for background services, rather than the general public, I would not attempt running an email server with the same RAM as I used in the 90s, 00s, or 10s.
The tools for hosting a website have barely gone up in requirements.
And for those documents I bet you could convert them and they'd work fine.
Yeah, it went from ~$10 / month to ~$30 a month to rent a relatively beefy VPS capable of doing the above (game servers being the most resource demanding of the lot). Still well within hobby money.
They're not more expensive than a decade ago, when we were still using them.
DO Droplets are still $5/mo, as are OVH VPS’es.