Webhosting

Here's some free web hosts you can use to host your website.

I won't tell you what to use. I'm a noob myself, and a hobbyist, and I don't know everything. I use Vercel. Some of my friends use Nearly Free Speech. Some of my friends self host on a nintendo DS running Linux in their kitchen. Others have their own preferences. It all depends on what you need.

It's free. A lot of people use it. It has social media features (profiles you can comment on, follower counts, likes on profile updates) so that gives you free serotonin and encourages you to post more if you like social media features. There's some Bluesky integration so you connect poopoo.neocities.org as your bsky username.

The main limitations are on file types (no videos, audio, zip) and restricting most programming languages to HTML/CSS/JS to keep their costs low and encourage more “evergreen” sites that don't require too many other dependencies.

Neocities is fairly “free speech” in that the TOS openly says you may see offensive and sexual content on there. I have seen sites dedicated to racism, real death/gore photos, calls for genocide, and transphobia on there. Those sites may or may not be deleted if you report them. The dev has said that complete generated sites are low quality spam and thus against TOS and bannable, but cannot and will not restrict users' use of genAI.

On an interesting note, Neocities has a somewhat unspoken ban on “lolicon” and “shotacon” - sexual art of underage characters. From emails I've been shown, this is due to legal reasons. You may see some people slide under the radar with pornography of Naruto's ass. You may know other people who get banned for the same reason.

There is one guy running the whole thing, and Neocities is not updated with many new features (though as an “old web” throwback it doesn't necessarily need many new features) or communications with users. The official blog updates like once every 3 years.

There is a paid tier on Neocities that is $5 a month. You get a few more gigs of storage, and the ability to connect a domain with that payment. It's a bit low on features for the amount of money you'd pay, compared to other mainstream paid hosts like NFS or Dreamhost.

If you're new to making your own site with HTML/CSS, Neocities is a fine introduction. It's friendly and starts you off with a tutorial. There's a thriving community on there that makes resources, templates, and tutorials for other people on a similar skill level. Hey, I even managed to write a stripped down tutorial on how to use the "deploy from github to neocities" tool!

If you are more experienced in webdev, you will find Neocities features limited: from the editor, the file uploader, to the file type restrictions. I've found the image loading to be a bit slower than than my current site (especially for large amounts of images, like a 32 page comic). And hotlinking is disabled on the free tier.

It's been around for like 10 years now, and doesn't seem to have too many huge issues. The dev is very hands-off and into other technology like machine learning and crypto lol.

It's free. It's run by a small clique of people with a discord server so you'll be able to talk to the devs and get updates personally. It feels much more catered to zoomers and other young folks who like aesthetics and weebery.

Nekoweb has oodles of features when compared to Neocities. From their FAQ:

• you can customize your site box
• no file type limits for free
• no content security policy for free, you can fetch things freely
• you can invite others to edit your site
• you can see 1 month of site statistics for free instead of 1 week
• FTP instead of WebDAV
• Git support
• arguably better file editor: switch file within editor, supports autocompletion, emmet, formatting and more
• ability to use NekoVM to build your site with any js static site generator or framework
• support for custom http headers
• instead of social features directly on site, we only have a RSS feed
• cheaper donator perks: you can get all perks for $3 vs $5 on Neocities
• cool centralized community on discord
• the fact that, well, it's not Neocities. good to have another alternative, right?

Most notable from that list for me is the RSS feed rather than profile guestbooks. This could be cool to encourage more people to write and read RSS throughout the web, if they see it as a standard for reading on their friends' sites.

Nekoweb also runs atabook, a free guestbook you can embed in your personal site, regardless of host. Atabook's TOS is notable in that it bans erotic content:

We won’t allow Clients involved in the following activities and/or affiliated with 3rd party websites involved in the following activities: …erotic content, sex… https://atabook.org/terms

Overall, Nekoweb's TOS is more strict and more enforced than Neocities. The Nekoweb TOS explicitly forbids lolicon and shotacon art, as well as hate speech and live action pornography. They also have rules against pornographic art on the front page of your site. This can be a pro or con depending on what you're looking for in moderation.

I haven't used it, and I don't have any reason to use it right now. It seems like a direct “upgrade” to Neocities should you need the offered features, and if you trust the anonymous Discord group more than a faceless company like Github's Pages. They have a lot of direct community activities and involvement, like making for-profit zines together.

And with small tight-knit communities you get the pros and cons of friendship and breakups :P They're relatively new as a site. No telling how long they'll last as a host! But you can always try it, and save your site if you ever wanna move.

• Kalechips list of hosts
• A list of free site hosts comparing for Adult Content policies I wrote in 2022 and haven't updated