Alternatives to Neocities?

[kurohaato]

My friend asked me about this the other day and I really didn't have a good answer for her besides github pages. She doesn't have a melonland account, so I asked her if it would be alright for me to post this for her. From what I understand, she'd prefer something that's more decentralized and less social media-y. Any recommendations would be a great help.

[Memory]

[removed by author]

[glitchlynx]

I've personally only used neocities, but I found this list of alternative hosts and places to avoid a little while ago.

[Mela]

Besides the ones that have already been mentioned, Ichi also seems like a nice alternative to me. Sadly I can't say much else about it because I too have only used Neocities so far.

[Melooon]

There's really nothing quite like neocities in terms of reliable free web hosting that can be easily used by anyone

Itchi is a great mini-host, but I'm not sure I can say it'll have the stability that Neocities has, I feel like it could vanish if anything happened to @m15o, am I wrong about this? 

You can of course pay for hosting on something like Namecheap, but I've seen so many nice sites that moved onto paid hosting with good intentions vanish within a year because their owner stopped paying.

The most reliable host of all is usually universities; if you're a university member they will often give you a public-facing account on their site which will be reliably funded for decades - but that's a lot less common these days.

Another oldy time approach is email providers; I know that FastMail still includes free static HTML hosting with their email accounts (but those are paid  ); since you're a lot less lightly to let your email account get deleted though, this can be a good approach for some people.

Another free but quite techy solution I've used in the past is amazon s3 hosting - its a bit weird to setup, but it's essentially free since they don't charge unless you have a HUGE amount of visitors.

Finally, there is @xandra 's Marigold town - I think you need to apply to it and it's a small project like Itchi, so again it could close at some point; but it will definitely suit some people! https://marigold.town/

[Sara Joy]

I use Netlify and I'm pretty happy with it :) Their landing page is getting ever more corporate and businessy (rather than the previous 'just drop your files here!' welcome page) though, which I can see would be off-putting.

I do keep my eyes open though because I like to know what options I have, and in case Netlify changes on me.

If I start wanting a proper server type situation where I'm writing php to generate my site, I'd probably move to Hetzner.

But for another 'just drop your files' type thing, I really like the new https://yay.boo

[BinaryDigit]

https://leprd.space is awesome. The person is very responsive if you ever had questions or needed to change something in your account. It doesn't seem like they are taking on new accounts though, but would be good to keep an eye out.

https://netlify.com is great and my current hosting space. Indeed is a bit corporate but has been reliable and useful. I love that it has notifications, and lots of features and space.

Codeberg has free static site hosting at https://codeberg.page

W3 schools also free hosting https://www.w3schools.com/spaces but I've not used it myself.

I recently discovered https://hotglue.me but haven't used it myself.

https://mmm.page/ is fun if you want a drag and drop style site

[lime360]

i think geocities.club is the best choice because it's a remake of geocities made by the people from tilde communities

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

If decentralization is wished, P2P-Hosting might be of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_web_hosting
from these, DAT is - as far as I know - the one that might be of use without getting your friend in a bad neighborhood. Still, it is rather complicated, exotic, experimental, and will greatly reduce your friends possible userbase.

An alternative way that was also used back in the days is to host a webserver on your PC and get a Dynamic DNS-Service that you use as your static "domain". This method got its drawbacks: Since small websites aren't heavily frequented usually, the bad performance when dealing with high traffic won't matter to much; but the fact that it is only active when your PC is on might be a problem (using an cheap one-chip computer like the Rasberry PI might be a way to deal with this - but for this one basically invests the budget to host your site for a few years - Hetzner is at around 30 bucks annually). But if your friend does it this way, they'll have the complete control (should be on their guard when it comes to security; always patch your software!), all the functions of a server, and learn a lot on the way.

[chillbro]

buruma.net is another one

[lime360]

https://tiiny.host/ another one i found on nitter

[Memory]

https://nekoweb.org is another one

[rhenn]

Cloudflare is also an option, though it's also a bit techy to set up. However their hosting is quite cheap, and they sell domains at cost so you can usually get a custom domain cheap if it's something you're interested in.

You can also buy a domain and host the site itself somewhere else, as far as I'm aware.

[lime360]

https://nekoweb.org is another one

nekoweb is what i currently use to host my site, it's actually pretty cool and i like the supporter ability to use ftp and git for site management (i mostly prefer git)

[Turboblack]

try:
http://w10.host

There are a lot of advantages - you really get an old-school website that will

work in old browsers, via HTTP (also https)

you will be able to edit the site from the admin panel (even under DOS).

you can add your domain painlessly

if you are not satisfied with third-level domains