Hosting Providers

[jessica]

[100 years later]

i've used more hosts than i can remember anymore, and they've all felt remarkably similar. most hosting providers now generally have the same bare minimum toolset (cough except neocities cough, which is it's own beast) the biggest distinction i've noticed is definitely support - some places i've used were super dead, had a bunch of broken or outdated links on their website, and super slow response times. for me, that's the biggest consideration after cost/storage/bandwidth.

i actually used the same host for 10 years until recently, lol. there was a moment in the early 2010s where hosting was insanely cheap, and i found a plan that was $10/year for 2GB storage and unlimited bandwidth (the same place costs $9/mo for something equivalent now ) but i was able to keep the "legacy" plan, which worked great for me since my website has been essentially on standby mode.

unfortunately, that host has been pretty dead for awhile now, and i wanted something that would support some more advanced projects i'm planning, so i switched to scalahosting a few months ago (after a lot of research) the cost kind of makes me want to cry, but they've been really fantastic so far. i can also host my boyfriend's domain now, which helps justify the cost a bit lol.

i do use neocities for one website, and i really love their social functionality! it's such a perfect bridge between modern social media standards & freeform web design projects, i wish i could use them just for that. the fact that they don't support ftp or .htaccess drives me a little crazy

[mima]

I've started using infinityfree for a professional website. It's a learning curve if you've never hosted outside of Neocities or FC2, but for those on Teacake and the sorts it should be relatively easy. They have a bunch of documentation to help you, and the forums are pretty active.

I very much enjoy how you can use a custom domain without needing to pay for hosting. DNS propagation across the world, however, is extremely slow (and I'm unsure if this is an infinityfree problem specifically, or just DNS servers being taking forever to update). You can use PHP and SQL completely free, but I have not used these so I can't comment further. You get 5GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, a limit of 50k hits a day, and a limit of 59.4k inodes (files and directories). I'm trying to find serious catches, but can't yet. It's something worth considering if you want to dabble in dynamic websites but don't want to fork out too much money or wait for Teacake and Leprd.space to open up registrations again.

[Robyn]

[100 years later]

i've used more hosts than i can remember anymore, and they've all felt remarkably similar. most hosting providers now generally have the same bare minimum toolset (cough except neocities cough, which is it's own beast) the biggest distinction i've noticed is definitely support - some places i've used were super dead, had a bunch of broken or outdated links on their website, and super slow response times. for me, that's the biggest consideration after cost/storage/bandwidth.

i actually used the same host for 10 years until recently, lol. there was a moment in the early 2010s where hosting was insanely cheap, and i found a plan that was $10/year for 2GB storage and unlimited bandwidth (the same place costs $9/mo for something equivalent now ) but i was able to keep the "legacy" plan, which worked great for me since my website has been essentially on standby mode.

unfortunately, that host has been pretty dead for awhile now, and i wanted something that would support some more advanced projects i'm planning, so i switched to scalahosting a few months ago (after a lot of research) the cost kind of makes me want to cry, but they've been really fantastic so far. i can also host my boyfriend's domain now, which helps justify the cost a bit lol.

i do use neocities for one website, and i really love their social functionality! it's such a perfect bridge between modern social media standards & freeform web design projects, i wish i could use them just for that. the fact that they don't support ftp or .htaccess drives me a little crazy

I'd love to start seeing people hosting their sites with a friend's domain again. I suppose there's less of a need now that we're all adults, but I always enjoyed being part of a group of hostees on a large domain.

[AngelEyeSprings]

I started self-hosting recently and followed this guide. I use Vultr for the VPS and
Njalla for the url. I am very happy with these services so far. You can go cheaper than Njalla too. It's kinda expensive, but roughly the same as a Netflix subscription for me.

You will have to use Linux commands for the Vultr terminal. This is obvious to those with experience, but it's less much accessible than NeoCities or similar sites for obvious reasons. I have even more freedom outside of NeoCities though, and I'm happy to play around with dynamic website stuff. It's fun to learn new skills!

[mima]

I started self-hosting recently and followed this guide. I use Vultr for the VPS and
Njalla for the url. I am very happy with these services so far. You can go cheaper than Njalla too. It's kinda expensive, but roughly the same as a Netflix subscription for me.

You will have to use Linux commands for the Vultr terminal. This is obvious to those with experience, but it's less much accessible than NeoCities or similar sites for obvious reasons. I have even more freedom outside of NeoCities though, and I'm happy to play around with dynamic website stuff. It's fun to learn new skills!

I temporarily used Vultr for a while but I found it too expensive for my needs, which was just a static website. Having a VPS still affords you a lot of freedom though! I also forgot to mention that my domain registrar is Namecheap. I previously used Epik which was fine too.

[jessica]

[100 years later]

i've used more hosts than i can remember anymore, and they've all felt remarkably similar. most hosting providers now generally have the same bare minimum toolset (cough except neocities cough, which is it's own beast) the biggest distinction i've noticed is definitely support - some places i've used were super dead, had a bunch of broken or outdated links on their website, and super slow response times. for me, that's the biggest consideration after cost/storage/bandwidth.

i actually used the same host for 10 years until recently, lol. there was a moment in the early 2010s where hosting was insanely cheap, and i found a plan that was $10/year for 2GB storage and unlimited bandwidth (the same place costs $9/mo for something equivalent now ) but i was able to keep the "legacy" plan, which worked great for me since my website has been essentially on standby mode.

unfortunately, that host has been pretty dead for awhile now, and i wanted something that would support some more advanced projects i'm planning, so i switched to scalahosting a few months ago (after a lot of research) the cost kind of makes me want to cry, but they've been really fantastic so far. i can also host my boyfriend's domain now, which helps justify the cost a bit lol.

i do use neocities for one website, and i really love their social functionality! it's such a perfect bridge between modern social media standards & freeform web design projects, i wish i could use them just for that. the fact that they don't support ftp or .htaccess drives me a little crazy

I'd love to start seeing people hosting their sites with a friend's domain again. I suppose there's less of a need now that we're all adults, but I always enjoyed being part of a group of hostees on a large domain.

same!! it was such a huge deal back in the day, i miss it! it was always so exciting to have a site hosted by someone else, even though i always had a domain where i hosted people in return. i liked having the option of different domain names and such, idk. consequently, it's sometimes hard to find older websites when people hopped from one host to another. but that's part of the fun when looking for old websites on the wayback machine, i guess lol.