Originally written .
I made a small site on Neocities, telaneo.neocities.org. It's just a landing page pointing back here, but it was nice and easy to set up. I obviously already have a CSS stylesheet and enough knowledge about HTML and how I want my website to look, so all of that obviously wasn't going to be a problem, but they have a nice drag-and-drop file-uploader, and the results of your uploads are visible instantly after refreshing that second tab you have open.
For a newbie though, they also have a really nice tutorial going through the basics of HTML, as well as a bunch of links to quite a few helpful resources. For all the stuff I do, Mozilla's MDN does the job, and that's obviously linked, but there are other clearly useful resources there, like some nice CSS frameworks if you don't feel like making your own styles from scratch. I can definitely imagine giving a complete newbie this, and within an hour they've made at least a nominal website, and if they're enjoying themselves, it might even start to look good after a few more of them. Not to mention that thanks to the 1 GB of web storage you get, as long as you don't go overboard with high-resolution images, you don't need to worry about running out of space. I'd imagine the 200 GB of bandwidth you get is plenty, at least of you don't go viral.
If they were based in Europe, I'd probably pay for the supporter tier and host my website there, since they seem like good people with their heart in the right place. The free tier puts some restrictions on what type of files you can upload, that is, you can't upload anything that can't be directly viewed on a web page, and videos also aren't allowed. Only images plus various text file types that are common on web pages (and fonts to, I guess). That's honestly very reasonable, since they don't want to become a file dump; they want to stay a host for personal and individual web pages. That restriction goes away if you pay though, which is honestly pretty great. Then I'd be able to have some small videos on my web page. I'd also be able to use my custom domain there. That's also a paid feature, which again, is honestly pretty reasonable.
It's a shame they're American and there doesn't seem to be a decent European alternative. I have nothing against them for being American, but the world is a fickle place, and I'd rather not send money in that direction if I can avoid it. The best European alternative I've used is honestly Codeberg. They support Github Pages-style web hosting, and I would have this website hosted there if it weren't for the fact that Codeberg doesn't support plain HTTP. See HTTP only mode on the Codeberg Pages issue tracker. I want my website to be accessible over plain HTTP so that I can dick around on there with old computers and VMs, since then I have a very good idea of how things should look and work. Sadly, getting HTTPS to work on old computers is just not worth it, if it's even possible in many cases. We apparently lost something going over to HTTPS.
TL;DR: Neocities good. Go try it out if you want to make a simple web page that's truly yours.
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