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.

[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.