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Today we dedicate an article to what we consider a beautiful discovery (thanks to @EticaDigitale). Neocities, as many of you may have already guessed from the name, is an attempt to revive the 90s blogs/sites with all their strengths and weaknesses.
For those who don't know what we're talking about, let's make a very brief summary. In the 90s, at the dawn of the internet and until the early 2000s, personal websites and especially, personalized 1. He was probably the most famous of all GeoCities. In Italy, however, it was very fashionable Splinder 2.
GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 and then closed in 2009 3. Similar fate for Splinder which was acquired in 2006 by the Dada Group and closed a few years later, in 2012 2. The death of these sites is fundamentally due to the boom of social networks, on the front line Facebook.
Neocities, to create your own personalized space
Nobody was more interested in the idea of creating their own web space where they could tell what they wanted in favor of a cleaner and simpler space (that of Facebook) but terribly the same as all the others. In fact, among the many defects of Facebook (and they are not few, as we know) there is also that of having flattened the aesthetics of the web by making all the profiles identical, like a sort of digital filing.
Not that the sites of Geocities they were beautiful 4 5 let's be clear. Not in the strict sense of the word, but they certainly were unique 6. This uniqueness has disappeared a bit from the internet although now there seems to be signs of recovery in this sense 7. Some people still want to experiment, to go beyond social network filing, and they want to create something unique and above all personal.
In this sense, therefore, we really appreciated the idea of Neocities. First of all because it is a project Open source 8. Their business method is also interesting: they don't try to make money with inconvenient, useless and dangerous banners present on all pages as happened with GeoCities 9. Their income comes entirely from donations (it therefore tries to be a community project) and from premium version proposed at 5$ per month.
What does Neocities offer?
Just like GeoCities, the peculiarity of these sites is that anyone, often with very basic knowledge, can create their own website and make it as personal as possible. In the free version you will get 1 GB of space and 200 GB of bandwidth (monthly, we imagine, even if it doesn't say so). Not a lot but certainly enough for a simple website with few images. You can do all this with a third level domain, that is: nomedelvostrosito.neocities.org.
In the paid version you will instead get some interesting extras such as 50 GB of space, 3000 GB of bandwidth, no restrictions on uploading files, support for a custom domain (therefore without neocities.org) and much more.
What is offered by Neocities is therefore nothing more than a web Hosting free, an offer that we often read within the various communities and it therefore seemed interesting to propose it to you. For those who have no knowledge of HTML it is present a nice tutorial really basic, simple and easy to understand.
Why use it instead of other platforms?
Well in the meantime because it's a project Open source and because it seems in line with the principles of a better internet, outside the logic of Big Tech. Furthermore, what you are going to create will be very simple HTML pages and therefore you will not be tied to Neocities in any way: if you want to take all your work somewhere else, for any reason, a couple of copy and pastes will be enough. Colossi like Wix, instead, they try to keep you as much as possible inside the platform (lock-in) not allowing you to leave except with complicated methods 10.
And WordPress?
We have absolutely nothing against WordPress, of course. It's literally a myth and also The Alternatives It's based on WordPress. However, WordPress offers a lot and we are talking here instead of creating simple static HTML pages without big claims. Even in terms of impact (environmental, but not only) a WordPress site necessarily requires many more resources than a banal HTML page. In fact, WordPress requires the use of a database and also requires the use of PHP. Let's say that if all you need is a simple page with a few lines inside, using WordPress can be a bit like going to the corner to buy bread in your car.
Alternatives to Neocytes
As always, we only suggest pleasant alternatives that we believe to be useful, they should not be taken as the only alternatives to use. This is why we often quote alternatives of alternatives.
Lexi's Hosting
The first one we want to mention is an independent and Italian project: Lexi's Hosting it is in fact a real alternative to Neocities with one important difference: it also comes with a database MariaDB with access via phpMyAdmin ed it is therefore possible to also use dynamic pages in PHP. An email address is also provided, managed by Squirrel Mail, which can be used freely.
Registration is free and free even if it is possible buy a plan”Heehee“ paid which also allows the use of a personal domain and which we recommend especially if you want to support the project. You will also be given FTP access but if you prefer you can also upload, delete and edit files directly via Browsers. Once the site is activated you will be given a page
It's a new and interesting project that you can use for your websites, if you use it let us know what you think as it's new for us too!
•Codeberg
If, however, you only need HTML and nothing else you can think about relying on Codeberg.
Codeberg it's a'alternative to GitHub and for some time it has been offering a very interesting free service called Codeberg Page: if you leave your source code on Codeberg you will be able to automatically load it on a page offered by them. The page can be with domain codeberg.page (for example lealternative.codeberg.page) or, again for free, you can use your own domain as we did with list.lealternative.net (of which the source code it is, in fact, here).
Reading the documentation There don't appear to be any page or view limits.
- The Simpsons – Homer's Web Page[↩]
- In Italy, Splinder, which perhaps could have become Facebook, closes after ten splendid years[↩][↩]
- Yahoo! GeoCities on Wikipedia[↩]
- The Geocities Gallery[↩]
- Cameron's World[↩]
- A Perennial Garden[↩]
- The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back[↩]
- source code on GitHub[↩]
- Around 1997, GeoCities began to offset its costs by requiring its customers to display advertisements on the pages they hosted.[↩]
- How do I save my Wix website as HTML?[↩]
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