Are there any other hosting services that are also free and have decent storage that work as an alternative to Neocities? You can also toss in some paid services too in the comments that are very affordable if you know some.
EDIT: The social media aspect of neocities isn’t really something I’m interested in. It’s a nice side thing, but I find myself not really wanting to engage in it when it comes to building websites.
I know Neocities a very popular option among hobbyists, but here are some reasons why I’m not too fond of it these days.
Starting out with some things I do like about it is:
- Beginner Friendly. It already has a lot of things users are familiar with like comments, followers, etc etc.
- It has its own code editor. Although I don’t really use it, but at least it’s there for people who might not be familiar with other code editors.
- Tutorials to get people started
- The “social media” aspect. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the idea of being able to just comment under people’s profile and follow people so you can see their updates. It’s a lot easier for new devs to grasp, especially if they’re not familiar with rss. It’s also less tedious when it comes to keeping up with site updates when it comes to people you follow.
- The Supporter Tier For $5/month, you get some pretty cool perks like more storage (50 GB) and bandwidth (3000 GB), also the ability to make multiple sites under one account, basic email support and other benefits that I can’t list here.
But What I don’t like about it is:
- The limited languages it supports. I know that HTML-CSS and Javascript is of course there, but a lot of the back-end programs like PHP, SQL, Perl and many others I may not be familiar with are not possible within Neocities. The point is it intentionally supports front-end programming only. Which is great if you’re just starting out, but becomes more like training wheels the more you progress.
- How Websites are discovered. I know that you can still filter it by newest or most updated, but the point is that it often buries a lot of sites that may or may not have most hits or follows. A lot of spam also gets into the Newest sites. I feel like this kind of DEFEATS THE PURPOSE of making a personal website.
- Updates only work on a 24 hour basis. Every small change also gets shown as an update and you don’t really have control over whether or not you can keep it private until you’re ready to show it off.
- The “social media” aspect. I know you’re thinking that I already put it as a good thing. Well, it’s more of a double edge sword. While yes the socializing aspect of it is good, it also STILL emphasizes other things like followers, hits views into a number. Which again misses the point of having a personal website.
- You cannot change your domain name. While yes you can pay for the option to make your own custom one, but that’s not the problem here. The issue is the fact that as soon as you change your username on Neocities, the search results for your site break for some reason? I don’t mind seeing neocities.org in my domain, but I just find it frustrating that even though I’m given the option to change my user, it really isn’t beneficial.
I know this was a long list, but I had to talk about the things why someone may choose neocities as their hosting service and why others may prefer to use another hosting site. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I just wanted others that may be considering neocities as an hosting platform to get the gist of it.