[nathas]

Have you looked at FolioHD? It's geared towards photographers and artistic types that want a really nice portfolio website.

Paying an amount that is just-above-market-rate for a domain and not needing to understand how to configure DNS for someone non-technical seems like an absolutely worth-while reseller case.

[mcnichol]

If you want to be an artist then control of your intellectual property is probably a topic you care a great deal about.

Your domain and how people reach you is probably the first lever. If you are giving that up happily, I assume renting without the option to own or leasing a car is a sensible business model to you and you are just experimenting without any real intention of starting.

The effort and time in becoming an artist outweighs by at least two or three orders of magnitude the time it would take to read an article and setup a domain. Namecheap, GoDaddy, all these registrar's do it for you.

Imagine having 900 houses and renting them out to a community of like minded folks. Whether it is at cost or slightly above, it is "rent seeking" in the sense they own, you borrow.

While it isn't rented, they are squatting on it.

[karamanolev]

From my *personal* experience, the target audience, to a large degree, doesn't care at all about owning domains, websites or servers. They want something that just works and the less they have to deal with technology, the better. In that sense, a reasonable and ethical service where you own nothing is much better than one that preys on you and you still own nothing.

[sgammon]

Have you looked at Photobucket? Flickr? Facebook? Apple? Google/Android? S3? Dropbox?