It came to my attention that I wrote a review of the Nekoweb Discord before the Nekoweb Nekoweb and since a one paragraph blog post frankly is not good enough I'm going to bloat this post out with ratings of every webhost I've used. Feel free the just skip straight to the scores and yell at me. Do keep in mind these are all based on the quality of the free tier as webbing is meant to be my cheap hobby.
Neocities
| Storage | Bandwidth |
|---|---|
| 1GB | 200GB/mo |
Neocities free tier actually looks incredible at first glance, no normal indie site would ever need more than 1GB of storage or 200GB of bandwidth unless every image you're serving is incredibly high res but its free tier does have a pretty huge flaw that made it unusable for me, the lack of CORS support. This made me being able to use scripts like my Github commit history or LastFM last played impossible which wasn't something I wished to give up especially when there are other free options which don't have that downside. Neocities also has a rather strict file type restriction for free accounts, you can see the full list here but since I wanted to add some mp3s to my site at the time I found it to not be viable.
Score: 3/5
Github Pages
| Storage | Bandwidth |
|---|---|
| 1GB | 100GB/mo (Soft) |
Github Pages is the webhost I'm using right now. While it has less bandwidth than Neocities I'm not quite sure exactly how soft that limit is and I've never had any problems with it so I think I'll continue not to worry. Aside from that Github Pages seems pretty liberal with what it lets you do. I've never found a filetype I can't upload, there are no CORS limits nor any hotlinking limits and as a bonus you can choose your own custom domains for free. Workflows are also lifesavers and make my time spent infinitely less painful. I've heard from some people that my Github Pages site is slower than my Nekoweb one but in my experience it has actually been faster so that might be a geography thing.
Score: 4.5/5
Nekoweb
| Storage | Bandwidth |
|---|---|
| 500MB | Unlimited (Sorta) |
Nekoweb is the other webhost I use. I'm not super attached to it and I'd probably just be using Github Pages right now if updating my Nekoweb site with Github Workflows wasn't completely effortless but it does have some merit as a host. The inbuilt editor is pretty alright if you're into masochism, the terminal thing is certainly interesting though I've never really checked it out and it's certainly easier to grow your sites popularity on Nekoweb. The storage thing might be annoying for some people but personally my site is 20mb as I host images elsewhere so its not really a problem for me. On the FAQ it says for free users there's no bandwidth limit unless your site is consuming huge amounts of bandwidth. I'm not sure how much a huge amount is but with a 500MB storage limit I doubt you'll be hitting it regardless. The statistics and RSS feed thing are also pretty cool too though I don't really use them. Nekoweb is also fairly speedy for me which is nice.
Score: 4/5
Leprd
| Storage | Bandwidth |
|---|---|
| 1GB | 10GB |
My Leprd site is pretty dead but in my time using it I found it pretty disappointing. Leprd wasn't super speedy, 10GB bandwidth limit is far too low and I came close to hitting it on multiple occasions, CPanel is annoying and so is fuck ass FTP. I know hating FTP is more of a personal thing but for me it just feels slow and janky to use so updating my site was fairly tedious. Having PHP as an option is probably the main draw but it didn't exactly matter to me as someone who doesn't really care about PHP, I'm pretty fine with just a normal static site.
Score: 2/5
pages.gay
Not even going to bother with a proper writeup for this one because this is absolutely awful. Its so horribly slow its fully unusable.
Score: 0/5
Poyoweb
As Poyoweb #1 and perhaps only fan I'm just going to put it here for funzies. It's kind of dead in the water right now but I have hope (perhaps an unreasonable amount) that it'll manage to get back on its feet sometime.
Score: N/A
Serv00
| Storage | Bandwidth |
|---|---|
| 3GB | Unlimited |
If this wasn't the slowest webhost of all time (not including pages.gay of course at least Serv00 works also its servers happen to be on the other side of the world from me so if you're in Europe it'd be pretty fast) Serv00 might really have been too good to be true. Its free plan is kind of incredible, with the ability to use Node.js, PHP, Ruby, MySQL and many more, 100 websites, infinite bandwidth, 3x the storage of its closest competition and all without ads. Honestly I'd be recommending this higher if firstly it wasn't FTP based (my arch nemesis) but more importantly I don't trust it. I simply don't trust that this sketchy ass operation isn't don't some evil shit behind the scenes. It just seems too good to be true and I find it hard to place my trust in it.
Score: 3.5/5
I'll continue to update this page if I end up trying any new hosts or one of them blows up tragically. Also if you're reading this the day of release I haven't proofread sorry its late and I think I'm about to pass out forgive me for now please.