Personal Website General

[Deoster]

A lot of people here are fans of and have personal websites. I thought it'd be good to make a topic for people to share them, discuss, help out, and so on. Shill, talk about HTML, CSS, hosting, design and website philosophy, etc..
I will begin by very briefly shilling myself: I have just today set myself up at https://deoster.net, which I'm quite excited about

I thought about using a VPS but for my needs it seemed quite unnecessary, since there's nothing I really needed root access for and shared hosting seemed easier. I used KnownHost and it was super easy for me. What do you guys use for hosting and what do you like/dislike about it?

[AIpiqiA]

Looks like your site has quite a bit of content already! I launched my site last month before I had much content to put on it so it's all still WIP. I might add more, or continue to clean up the stuff I have on it.

https://aipiqia.neocities.org

The end goal of my site is to be able to provide me a good enough place to output content I would otherwise not have enough motivation to make, and also to make myself independent from other platforms without my own will, aka become an Internet Landlord or something like that.

I'm using neocities and recently have gotten neocities-deploy so I don't have to deal with neocities' shitty web editor, and can use my local editor and launch the local directories from cli instead. Not sure what to think about having a third party between me and my own site though. I started off from using nekoweb, which I hosted my older site on, but found that it's a bit too limiting in terms of what types of site it seemed I could make.

I'm only temporarily using neocities until I set up some server or decide to get a VPS. It's just the most popular gratis hosting option that was simple enough for me to transfer to from nekoweb.

[Amlux]

Excellent website Deoster. I'm excited to see you get it off the ground and have added a link to it on my site.

Though I have a VPS, I will say that you shouldn't feel pressured to get one. It's always been a minority of sites on the internet that are totally self-hosted and there's nothing wrong with that. I didn't need a VPS until very recently, and it's mostly just that I'm lucky enough to have the spare income to be able to afford one. As a long-term goal, I might even try to open up my storage space to allow others to host on my site. But until you start getting into more resource-intensive territory like hosting a stream or a forum, there really is no need to become self-hosted. There's certainly a psychological comfort in it, but the accessibility and coherence of the internet is always going to depend on mutual efforts. So embrace it!

I use DreamHost for hosting and they've been very good to me the whole way through. Unless you're planning to host pirated content, US companies are still among the best for not taking you down for thought crimes. However, DreamHost's VPS options were pretty limited. So I use Vultr for hosting now, but I don't know if they're the best option these days or not. They aren't as cheap as they used to be, it seems, but you get a lot out of what you pay for.

I might as well talk about some long-term goals for my site here (in rough order of priority/easiness):

• Get my stream free from these certification issues and have a php script on the main page which accurately reports when I'm live. Give the option of tying this to an email or browser notification in case people want to be notified.
• Make my CALENDAR section prettier. Before I had it lined up more like a traditional calendar with weeks in a horizontal order, but the days were getting too crowded and hard to read. This could be fixed if you could click on a day and details would pop out, like Heyuri's calendar. Emails or browser notifications could also be possible here (or even something like Radicale), though having a countdown for events on my main page like I do now seems to be a good form of reminding people.
• Create some private chatrooms for forum members. This could include hosting an XMPP MUC (technically I think I have this already as I have Prosody set up on my server, but I can't quite figure out how to invite people to it...). Try to join at oppai.oracle@muc.pantsuprophet.xyz if you want or add my experimental account for it (amlux@pantsuprophet.xyz). Alternatively, host a Matrix server, an IRC server, and/or a Mumble server, depending on what I need them for. Hosting my email on my own server seems like a logical next step too.
• Create .onion and .i2p versions of my site, and also possibly a presence on alternative protocols like gopher or gemini.
• Find ways to allow others to be on my server, alternatively on my site itself. This could include having an XMPP account for my site, some kind of Matrix/etc. presence, etc. Maybe I could eventually find a way to allow them to stream games on my server or something like that. saint has something set up like this, but I think it's just a shared stream key so the group of streamers can't both go live at the same time if I understand correctly? Though this is much easier said than done. I couldn't get PeerTube to work on my server and right now am having some certification issues with Owncast. To avoid getting too many people at once that I can't control or trust, it might be necessary to do something like requiring "memberships" through a payment processor like Fosspay. I might find ways to make these memberships have rewards for those who don't necessarily want to contribute but still get some perk in a way that doesn't involve gatekeeping content, but it would have to be something that didn't cause me a ton of stress in my daily life.

I considered trying to integrate my GUESTBOOK on my own site, either with an atabook in iframes or with something like Isso. Though this seems less and less necessary since this forum offers a chance for people to share their thoughts/concerns more quickly.

[satoridepon]

What a great timing for this thread, I noticed that Neocities' domain just got taken down (censored) by their registrar today:

Code: Select all

Domain Name: neocities.org
Registry Domain ID: REDACTED
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
Updated Date: 2026-06-05T09:58:25Z
Creation Date: 2013-05-24T01:33:01Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2033-05-24T01:33:01Z
Registrar: NameCheap, Inc.
Registrar IANA ID: 1068
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@namecheap.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.9854014545
Domain Status: clientHold https://icann.org/epp#clientHold <---- censored
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Name Server: ns1.neocities.org
Name Server: ns2.neocities.org
DNSSEC: unsigned
URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://icann.org/wicf/
>>> Last update of WHOIS database: 2026-06-05T11:28:02Z <<<

With that being said, my personal site is http://neetlo.li if you want to check it out

[vulonkaaz]

What a great timing for this thread, I noticed that Neocities' domain just got taken down (censored) by their registrar today:

Code: Select all

Domain Name: neocities.org
Registry Domain ID: REDACTED
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
Updated Date: 2026-06-05T09:58:25Z
Creation Date: 2013-05-24T01:33:01Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2033-05-24T01:33:01Z
Registrar: NameCheap, Inc.
Registrar IANA ID: 1068
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@namecheap.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.9854014545
Domain Status: clientHold https://icann.org/epp#clientHold <---- censored
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Name Server: ns1.neocities.org
Name Server: ns2.neocities.org
DNSSEC: unsigned
URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://icann.org/wicf/
>>> Last update of WHOIS database: 2026-06-05T11:28:02Z <<<

With that being said, my personal site is http://neetlo.li if you want to check it out

namecheap almost never censor people

maybe they forgot to pay the bill

[satoridepon]

namecheap almost never censor people

maybe they forgot to pay the bill

Well Namecheap did censor them, note the clientHold status on the WHOIS which means the registrar took the domain away from them. Also forgetting to pay the bill is impossible, it says the domain expires in 2033.

[vulonkaaz]

seem like it really was namecheap censorship https://bsky.app/profile/neocities.org/ ... kenb35i223


i thought namecheap were the good guys, what should i even use now ?

[UptownRascal]

seem like it really was namecheap censorship https://bsky.app/profile/neocities.org/ ... kenb35i223

Damn, that seriously came out of nowhere... I have (or had) a site on there too, but fortunately I do have an alternative. Speaking of, here's those aforementioned sites, I do own both of them but they're for different purposes:

https://ludicrital.neocities.org - The Neocities site for my webcomic LUDICRITAL. Of course it's down now because of the aforementioned NameCheap shit, but I do have another mirror in web1.0hosting.net. Heads up, it has image embeds.

https://blitzdoughnuts.vern.cc - My personal site on vern.cc, deliberately evocative of drummyfish's own personal site. This is actually a pussified / censored version because I didn't want to piss off the pubnix too much, the regular version has more links and vulgarity, but it's still nice.

[vulonkaaz]