This post is partly me looking for advice, since I haven’t been able to make up my mind, and partly me ranting so I can get this onto “paper” so to speak.
For over a year(!!!) now, I’ve been wanting to change the URL/subdomain for my website (as I use Neocities). When I first made my site back in 2023, I just chose a username/URL without much thought and now I’m not super attached to it. I want it changed! But I know that just changing it can break stuff.
So here’s my thoughts so far
I could use redirects to point to the new URL, but I’m not sure if this could be against Neocities’ Acceptable Use in any way. Would I need to be supporter tier and have both sites on one account? Or could I have them on separate accounts?
Make a new site, keep the old one up with no redirects. Maybe just write in somewhere that the site moved. Less ideal than 1, but doable if Neocities doesn’t like 1.
Neocities is still the best option for me right now because I know nothing about server management, so a VPS is intimidating, and I’m still on a job hunt, so a reoccurring payment is also intimidating.
I think just writing this has helped a lot lol, but thoughts? Or insight into how Neocities handles redirects on the TOS level?
Did you craft your site by hand? It doesn’t seem like there’s too many pages, so you could honestly take an hour or two to redo your URLs by hand. URL migration tends to be a bigger issue when you have hundreds or thousands of pages (or if you use a content management system like Wordpress). There’s no need to make a new site; IIRC Neocities allows you to simply tie a domain name to your page. A URL would set you back like $10/year, but it’d be better, and you could cancel if you decided you wanted something else.
I did! And I know it would be trivial no matter what I do. My main concern is if other people have ever put links to my site on their own or similar; those would break, and I’d mostly feel bad for causing a dead link lol. This fear isn’t helped by the fact that Neocities does let you just change the url of every page automatically but warns that it’ll break all old links to your site.
As for a custom URL: I’d have to have Neocities supporter to do that, which is $5/month on top of the yearly payment. Also fairly cheap ultimately, but as I said in the first post I don’t want to start any reoccurring payments until my job hunt is finally over.
i don’t think redirects are against neocities tos as long as you’re not redirecting to a phishing scam or something haha. neocities tos is veeery permissive and enforcement is pretty spotty anyway; afaik there’s no active moderation whatsoever and it depends entirely on user reports. if you’re really worried about it, i think it’d be fine to just replace the old site index with a blank page that says “moved to newurl.neocities.org”
but also i dont think it’s a big deal either which way; people change their urls all the time on neocities. worst case scenario someone notices a broken link and then has to search for a minute to fix it
If you’re really worried about a potential TOS violation, you can always just email neocities directly and ask. That’s what I did when I was worried about what would happen to my extra sites if I cancelled my supporter membership.
The best way I could think of is getting a TLD and routing it to your existing Neocities account but as this is out of question…
There also is the possibility of making use of a JavaScript redirect that automatically redirects to the new version of the old page that is now hosted on your new subdomain.
This will be convenient for users who have followed a link to your old subdomain. To have a fallback for users that don’t have JS enabled, you could show a link to the new page in plain html which tells the user that your site has moved.
I set my neocities page to be a message saying “CaffeineAndLasers Has moved” with a link to my new URL, and it’s been like that for over a year without issue
One other alternative which I considered (and didn’t bother with) is just mirroring the site. If you are managing your site with git, there is nothing stopping you from pushing your website to two domains at once
Slight aside (I know this isn’t the focus of your post) but I’d like to point out, you wouldn’t need to jump from Neocities to a VPS, you can use any number of shared hosting services instead. There is absolutely no rush to get into server management when you’re able to afford the cost of hosting.
That aside, if you do ever hop away from Neocities you can always keep the old version of the site as-is (no updates, just leaving it the exact way it was when you finally jumped to a new spot) and put notes that your location has changed, so that links still work for as long as neocities is alive and gives means for others to see that you’ve moved and where to find you.
when i changed my neocities username i just put a message about moving on the homepage of the old username but when i moved to nearlyfreespeech i put in a proper javascript redirect
What I’ll do is email Neocities to see if a redirect would be okay, under what conditions, etc. Depending on the answer I get I’ll either go for a redirect (much more ideal) or just make a new site with a note on the old saying I’ve moved.
I’ll also update this with Neocities’ answer, as I imagine it could be of intrest/use to someone else out there!
