Are ppl actually using neocities to host their code???

[taraellenrose]

Hiyaaa! I've been looking through various videos and images on different forums with regards to coding since I'm a newbie and I notice a lot of ppl are (excuse me if this is the wrong lingo) hosting their code on external programmes to neocities but they still have neocities hosting the site. Is this true or is it bc I'm just looking at alot of coding stuff I'm seeing a lot of proper coding-heads using applications theyre more familiar with. At the end of the day I don't see myself hosting my code anywhere other than neocities bc my computer lacks the storage for another application and I'm only interested in amateur webcrafting (for the foreseeable anyway) but i guess i just wanted to throw that out there ¯\_(-.-)_/¯ 

[Dan Q]

The hosting provider you use doesn't have to have any impact on what programs are installed on your computer. You can write web pages on your computer and upload them to Neocities, Nekoweb, Codeberg Pages, Leprd.space, Netlify, or wherever else you want!

[fairyrune]

i use neocities as a web host, yeah! (which means they hold my files and attach a URL to them, enabling people to visit my site). some people host their sites themselves, some use other things like dan mentioned.

if you're asking about the programs people use to edit their code, you don't have to use anything but a default text editor. there's nothing special about them other than the extra tools that come with them to make life easier, but if you get on well enough with the neocities in-site code editor, that's okay! what i would recommend, however, is that you at least save a copy of your whole site to your PC - ideally every once in a while, or when you update it - so that if anything happens to your site, or to neocities as a whole, you have a backup that you can go from. if you're worried about file sizes, you can even zip that copy to reduce the size. you won't need to unzip it until you need it.

i will say that most editors are pretty lightweight. you're not looking at several-GB downloads, usually. but as i said, if you're cool with the way you're doing it now, that's just fine. but do think about a backup! 

[Melooon]

@taraellenrose There's a few interesting assumptions in your topic that might be worth digging in to, I'm bringing them up not to call them out, but because they are valid things that a newbie might think, and they do suggest maybe a misunderstanding about how the web works that would be worth discussing:

• What do you think is the relationship between an "application" and a "host"?
• What do you think is the relationship between your computer storage and your website?
• Can you list some of the "external programs" you see people talking about? and describe what you think they do?
• What is your definition of "amateur webcraft" verses "proper coding-heads"?

I'm curious to know your answers!

[Noah_S]

I'm also curious. I can't figure out how to respond because I can't make sense of the post.

[taraellenrose]

@Melooon @Noah_S Thanks for ur interest in my question! And thanks for categorising ur follow ups into separate questions; makes it easier for me to break down my thoughts :)))

1). In my mind a host is a place where your code goes and can also contain websites, like for example neocities, since it hosts my code for my site in my dashboard on my profile and it also is part of the url for my website. An application in my mind is an external place to host code and you can then (somehow, i have no idea how) put that code up as a separate website on browsers. I have heard of applications like Github and Notebook, but again i have zerooo clue how they work. so like, a host can hold both the code and the website, but the application only holds the code and then the site has to be uploaded somewhere to be operational. does this line of thinking make sense? again this is in my mind so i'd love if you could clarify
2). I don't think there's any link between my computer storage and my website (particularly since I'm hosting my website on the web) but say if I were to get an external application like Notebook (in my mind also an application is like an app where you download it and it holds ur website, kind of like say microsoft word; its an app that takes up storage on ur computer and it also takes storage to hold your files) then it would take computer storage to maintain ur website. I've seen pictures of physical servers before for running huge websites and hearing stuff in youtube videos about old websites like "the servers couldn't keep up with the volume of ppl on the site" so i suppose that's where the assumption about storage and running a site comes from.
3). Amateur web-craft vs proper coding-heads all depends on someone's intentions definitely. It's not like I'm saying that people that use the index.html on their neocities profile dashboard for personal sites are all amateurs and people that have more elaborate sites say like melonland or onio.club are hosting them on an external application like say notebook or github. Again its all about the intention and probably experience as well. I suppose the difference in my mind is maybe like someone writing a diary vs someone writing a novel with the intention of publishing it. Like if someone is writing a novel with the intention of publishing it, theyre aware of the grammar rules and making sure narration is consistent and the intention is that HEAPS of people are going to see it. Whereas with a diary you're not so worried about how well it reads, it's just for you and maybe in years to come you'd show it to a few close friends or something. That's what I think the difference is.

I hope you don't think I'm horribly skewed for thinking some of these things, but that's kind of the way I'm seeing things as someone who is a week at coding. Please correct me on my assumptions, i'd like to have as clear an understanding as i can :)

[Melooon]

@Melooon @Noah_SI hope you don't think I'm horribly skewed for thinking some of these things, but that's kind of the way I'm seeing things as someone who is a week at coding. Please correct me on my assumptions, i'd like to have as clear an understanding as i can :)

Ok so you're not terribly far off I can totally understand what's confusing you based on what you said here.

A host: You are pretty much totally correct with this one; a host is a company or a service that hosts information or files on the internet.

A server: This is the actual computer that the host lives on, sometimes server and host are used interchangeably, but a host is more like a business, and a server is the building the business is in.

A service: Again this is like a business, a host offers service in the same way a a coffee shop offers a service. I would call GitHub or Neocities services that are also hosts.

An application or a program: These are things that run on your computer, e.g. code you have downloaded onto your computer and that lives and runs there. For example Photoshop, Word etc.  (loosely speaking) Application / App is the Apple name, Program is the Microsoft name for the same thing.

Files: these are blocks of data that are stored on a computer (an image, a html file, a word document). They could be stored on your computer, or hosted on a server by a business (like OneDrive, iCloud)

Bandwidth: when you send a file over the internet, that travel uses bandwidth; if your files are like people in a city, bandwidth is the number of them that can fit on a train at once. When people say that an old website was overwhelmed by too much traffic, they are talking about bandwidth usage, not storage. - For a novice you prob don't even need to think about this.


~ So, you're confusion seems to be that many businesses offer services that host files, but also offer applications to interact with those files, and some of them save them to your computer, but others save them to a server. The thing is that these are actually all totally separate technologies that just happen to get bundled together by a lot of modern businesses. Its not helped by the buzz word "Web App" which basically means a website that offers application-like features, but there is nothing special about it, its still just a  website.

Neocities for example is just a service/host, it has no application, and most web hosts would not have an application.

GitHub is a service that offers hosting built around a separate technology called Git; there are many applications that offer Git that you can install on your computer, but GitHub also offer their own custom one. You do not need to use GitHub to use Git, nor do you need to use the GitHub application to use GitHub 

Traditionally Microsoft Office was just a program you installed on your computer, and it had no service or host involved; these days they do offer file hosting and online stuff as an extra, but the actual program is still just on your computer.

~~ It is frankly confusing, particularly if you grew up in a world post-internet where all these things are much more mixed up 

The key thing to know for this thread is that an index.html file is just file, it can be stored on your computer (taking up a tiny bit of storage) or it can be hosted on a web server (host), like Neocities (which is a server, which is basically just someone else's computer)

Most "code heads" do both, they have their website files on their computer, and then they copy those files to their webhost when they are ready to allow other people to see them.

Your web host will never require a special application to edit a .html file, it can be edited in any text editor like, VSCode, or Notepad++, or it can be edited online using a service CodePen, or the Neocities editor. (Though I should note Word is not a text editor, its a formal document writer and cant be used for code!)

There are many ways to copy html files from your computer to your web host (github is a popular if ridiculously complex method used by neocities people way too often), but the easiest method is just to drag the files from your computer into your hosts file upload window - and that's fine for an amateur site.

[taraellenrose]

@Melooon thanks for the really comprehensive explanation! It means a lot that you took the time to type all that stuff up to save me some confusion :))) definitely took a couple of reads but i understand a lot better now, thank you :D