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Congrats on the launch! I had an initial thought of coming up with a site like this, but decided that providing an open HTML platform was best (hence, https://n

Congrats on the launch! I had an initial thought of coming up with a site like this, but decided that providing an open HTML platform was best (hence, https://neocities.org https://neocities.org). But I'm happy someone finally scratched the itch. Random thoughts: You're going to want to use subdomains for the sites, otherwise all sites are sharing the same domain security model, and you're going to run into problems when (not if, when) a site gets reported for abuse/phishing/spam/ect issues. Path origin security support is years out. While you're on subdomains, get a wildcard SSL cert and default to it. Neocities started without SSL, and next month I'm paying the price for that sin - we're switching to default SSL and unfortunately it's likely going to break a lot of sites. It's not really a choice anymore, given the political climate and the upcoming pagerank dock from Google. If the site explodes in popularity, I'm happy to give advice. There's a lot of problems I've solved relating to running a massive web hosting service for a lot of people. Some of it required months of research and some serious firehose drinking to figure out. Lastly, don't be afraid to ask for money - at least $5/mo, if you go lower you're just crop sharing for the credit card companies. At a bare minimum, throw up a PayPal donation button. I've learned that if you provide a useful service, people will pay you, even if there's an excellent free option. I'd rather pay a small amount to help sustain a service than have it fall apart from lack of funds and/or dev interest. That's a good thing and it's worth something. To illustrate the importance of at least a donation button: HN users donated over $4000 to us on launch, and I ran the site on that budget for almost two years. Site possibly wouldn't exist today without HN support. Sometimes the comment sections betray this (I'm including myself in this statistic), but kind hearted, wonderful people lurk here. Good luck.

desireco42 10y ago
This part about HN people is heart-warming :).
kristerv 10y ago
incredible response. Thank you for the effort. Quite an eye opener. Like didn't think about subdomains that way - valuable insight. SSL is top3 on my todo list. Currently I charge extra for the domain - seems to be a simple way of doing it. Donations? Wow didn't think that could be so supportive. I'll be sure to contact you as soon as the need comes again. You seem to be a valuable resource indeed :)
thegeomaster 10y ago
Sorry for the off-topic, but I have to share: A year and a half ago, I was looking for a place that would allow me to host a single HTML page for free. A couple of shady free hosting sites later, I came across Neocities. It was a breeze to set up an account there and host a short story of mine in HTML format. I found myself giving out the link to anyone who'd like to check it out, without needing to e-mail them a PDF (or even worse, a Word document). I like nice typography and readability so sending a simple text file was not the ideal option either. But a link to a page was perfect: it displays well on every device and the page can easily be updated. I wrote the whole thing in Markdown and hacked together a short script to generate HTML from it, which I could easily drag-n-drop to Neocities for quick iteration based on remote people's feedback. I never wrote again, but if I did, I'd definitely use the same method. An open platform for HTML publishing is essential to keeping the spirit of the minimalist, hyperlink-driven Web alive. So thank you for Neocities, and cheers!
sandGorgon 10y ago
this sounds interesting. what kind of problems occur in domain hosting? i would assume a lot of them can be solved today with a combination of amazon s3, cloudfront and cloudflare. even scale probably does not come into the picture. is it stuff like custom domains (which i assume is nginx+lua magic)

desireco42 10y ago

This part about HN people is heart-warming :).

kristerv 10y ago

incredible response. Thank you for the effort. Quite an eye opener. Like didn't think about subdomains that way - valuable insight. SSL is top3 on my todo list. Currently I charge extra for the domain - seems to be a simple way of doing it. Donations? Wow didn't think that could be so supportive. I'll be sure to contact you as soon as the need comes again. You seem to be a valuable resource indeed :)

thegeomaster 10y ago

Sorry for the off-topic, but I have to share: A year and a half ago, I was looking for a place that would allow me to host a single HTML page for free. A couple of shady free hosting sites later, I came across Neocities. It was a breeze to set up an account there and host a short story of mine in HTML format. I found myself giving out the link to anyone who'd like to check it out, without needing to e-mail them a PDF (or even worse, a Word document). I like nice typography and readability so sending a simple text file was not the ideal option either. But a link to a page was perfect: it displays well on every device and the page can easily be updated. I wrote the whole thing in Markdown and hacked together a short script to generate HTML from it, which I could easily drag-n-drop to Neocities for quick iteration based on remote people's feedback. I never wrote again, but if I did, I'd definitely use the same method. An open platform for HTML publishing is essential to keeping the spirit of the minimalist, hyperlink-driven Web alive. So thank you for Neocities, and cheers!

sandGorgon 10y ago

this sounds interesting. what kind of problems occur in domain hosting? i would assume a lot of them can be solved today with a combination of amazon s3, cloudfront and cloudflare. even scale probably does not come into the picture. is it stuff like custom domains (which i assume is nginx+lua magic)