Free Hosting Suggestions

[craftyhobbit]

Hi, I am a neocities user, but recently I've found that the social media-like follow function, profile commenting and recent activity page has started making me feel uncomfortable using the site. I would like to find a free host like neocities that allows me to create a website using old fashioned coding techiques that is free of the social media aspect. I'm not interested in followers, and getting comments for the things that I'm working on - I just want to create a small site to hold the stuff I'm working/researching, but I keep finding free hosts that rely on premade templates and AI content generation. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Comments

[kradeelav]

https://squidge.org/ - i think is going to be the best bet for you; i know a lot of fandom-adjacent people build their personal sites on it and love it.

https://nekoweb.org - recently heard of this as an alternate to neocities. personally don't know of anyone that uses it but my group tends to post kink art that only select hosts will look at; you might be more comfortable with their approach.

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ - *very* cheap and very old school host if you don't mind paying pennies vs straight up free; it's the one i used to host my site. all you need is a file transfer program like filezilla to copypaste the folder structure in.

[falkner]

I highly rec altervista.org! The English landing page seems targeted at people who want premade layouts or WordPress, but at its core it's just a host for html/php pages with some limited database capabilities if you are interested in that as well. I've been hosting small websites and miscellaneous web pages with them for about 15 years now with no issue.

[tempural]

Here's a good reviewed list of free hosts: https://kalechips.net/stuff/hosting

I personally use Vercel to host my site, but that requires some git knowledge.

A friend of mine recently got a site on https://leprd.space/ to host their art, and that requires an application.

[thepasteldyke]

I know you're supposed to be able to disable your profile page on neocities so people can't follow or comment, etc, but if you feel like the part where you see other people's profiles also stresses you out, then yeah, an alternative might be good.

I've never used nekoweb, but I've read up on them a tiny bit (was considering switching to there, but their account size is a lot smaller than neocities, which might be an issue for me since I've uploaded a few videos to neo), so do be aware that apparently when you're logged in you can see other logged in user's cursors, and they can see yours, and you can chat through clicking on someone else's cursor. From my understanding of the FAQ at least, so that might defeat the purpose of switching, depending on how exactly the cursor thing works.

Again, I haven't used it myself yet, so I don't know the details of it, just a heads up that you might want to look deeper into if you consider joining nekoweb, and depending on what your needs are.

[pebbleinalake]

I use nekoweb in addition to neocities. I personally prefer the neocities editor and layout a lot more. (Also, the nekoweb owner and staff give me weird vibes every time I go onto their discord.)

Though if people are looking to get away from the social side of neocities, nekoweb doesn't really have that so it might be a good option for that.

[thepasteldyke]

How intrusive do you find the cursors? I find the idea behind them kind of stressful, but since I haven't actually made an account yet I can't gauge how/how often people actually interact through them.

What kind of vibes? I don't use discord so I don't know anything about that kind of stuff. I've mainly been thinking of getting somewhere as a backup in case USA bans porn, but I could be mistaken in it being US based. Nekoweb was the one I was the most aware of outside neocities.

[pebbleinalake]

I think the cursors only show up on the explore page (at least, that's the only place I've ever seen them) and even then I don't often see other cursors. But also, there's a place in settings where you can just turn that feature off if you don't want it.

It's more of a general vibes thing; I don't like the feeling I personally get whenever I'm in their Discord and see the way they discuss the nekoweb site, as well as the weird amount of hate towards neocities. The discord is used basically as the nekoweb customer support line, but if you don't need to contact them for any reason than it should be easy enough to avoid.

I definitely recommend at least giving them a try to see how you like it since they have a free account tier. I personally don't see myself ever using it as my primary webhost, but I do still have a secondary website on nekoweb and it's been working fine for me.

[thepasteldyke]

I'm glad there's an option to shut it off. It honestly sounded so stressful to me.

That's a bit... odd. It did stick out to me how much neocities specifically is mentioned in the FAQ back when I first read it. It's not like neocities and nekoweb are the only two alternatives, so why mention just one, you know? not to mention it's not actually cheaper if you go cents-by-GB, the way is mentioned in the FAQ

I will probably check it out, see if I like it. After 20 years on the web, what's one more user account, lmao.

[craftyhobbit]

I'm confused about the cursor thing. I managed to stop my site showing up in the explore page, but is that all you need to do to stop people interacting with you? (I managed to pick up one follower before I managed to stop my site showing up in there - how do I get rid of them?) Can I delete the cursor image, elements.css and prettier.json files and not have it affect my site on there?

I've had a look at the other hosts suggested but none are really what I'm looking for. What I really want is something like how bravenet used to be before they made their free users pay for hosting. Paid hosting isn't an option for me because if we have a finianical issue, the paid website hosting hobby is the first thing to go and I lose all the work I've done.

[bluedreaming]

I’ve heard good things about squidge and nearlyfreespeech!

not very useful thing about nekoweb

I feel like I looked at nekoweb but something about it made me uncomfortable, though unfortunately I can no longer remember what, so I know that’s not very helpful.

From the htmlforpeople.com project, there’s a reference to yay.boo as an extremely tiny and very simple free website host (just drag in a folder), but at 10 mb that may be too small for your purposes (?). There’s also a page that links to a random site hosted with yay.boo so that could hypothetically reveal your site to someone, and I’m not sure if that can be turned off.

[octahedrite]

GitHub pages, Gitlab pages, netlify... https://alternativeto.net/software/github-pages/

[pebbleinalake]

People have already suggested some great alternatives, so I just wanted to let you know that there is also an option to turn off your profile page on neocities. It prevents people from following you, stops generating those update posts, and makes it so people can't comment on your profile. So, basically, the only way you'd see the more social side of neocities would be if you choose to go to the homepage yourself and interact with people. Just an option if you want to stay but still avoid the public profile thing.

[scifirenegade]

Wait, you can do that??

Is this a more recent thing? It's been ages since I updated my website.

[pebbleinalake]

I'm not sure when it started; as far as I know, it's been a thing since before I joined two years ago, but I only tried experimenting with it myself recently.

You can find it under the site settings page. (Settings > Manage Site Settings > Profile.) There will be two check boxes labeled "Disable Site Profile" and "Disable Profile Comments".

[scifirenegade]

Thank you!