Site Hosting

Obviously, currently, this site is hosted on Neocities. I mean, why wouldn't you start on Neocities if you want to try web building or running your own little corner of cyberspace? It's free, easy to get started, relatively user friendly even for an absolute newbie, and isn't crawling with ads or whatever to support the service.

And it's a fantastic deal and an amazing place to start out!

Only, I'm not doing this to learn the ins and outs of HTML, or how to fine tune CSS or how to craft Javascript.

I'm doing this to have a place to ramble about my crafts and my games and my life without being subject to the whims of the ubiquitous Algorithm™ and the all-powerful Advertisers™. I mean, we've all seen the infamous Tumblr purge of 2018 because Apple decided that certain content was no longer allowed if the site was to continue to have an Appstore presence. (Not that the porn went away completely, the porn bots and Nazis certainly didn't go anywhere.) We've seen the shit show that is Twitter's takeover by the Muskrat and how people can have their accounts terminated just for saying what they think about a guy who professes to love free speech but hates anyone doing less than singing his praises.

I just want a space that's mine. No rules to suit the 'clean', or more like sterile, content demands of advertisers. No need to cultivate a following and curate my posts to please an algorithm that cares only about engagement. No more turning me, the poster and you, the reader, into a product to be analysed and marketed towards.

Neocities would be great if I were just tinkering with HTML and posting little text guides and stuff. And I'll certainly be keeping this site up on here as a testbed for when I want to try out new scripts and scavenged code snippets.

But, while I'm not running out of space yet, I can see that happening from where I'm standing. The limited method of uploading files and organising pages is also becoming something of a drag. And Black Friday, the consumerist feeding frenzy, is nearly upon us.

Meaning, I can hopefully nab a cheap site hosting deal and bargain bin domain name for peanuts over the weekend!

For those interested, and for the sake of record keeping, I'm looking to grab a cheap .quest domain from NameCheap, hosted on their EU servers.

I'll copy this site over to there (as I said, this Neocities version isn't going anywhere) and try a more commercial hosting set up for a bit. See if it makes my life easier at all, what the benefits are (other than more space and easier file management) and whether it's worth it in the long run.

I will feed back afterwards, of course, and if it's going to stick around, I'll link the new domain.

So, watch this space. Maybe.