Why I won't use Nekoweb for hosting
With Neocisites being the biggest place for everyone to do web revival, as it is a free hosting site that makes everyone be able to have one, having a competition is good. A free option is even better for those who don't know where their web revival journey will go.
Nekoweb is a direct competitor to Neocities with a pretty much the same way of functioning. I heard of it due to a person I follow on tumblr who has a site on there, dedicated to a game we both play. Initially, I made an account before I even had a presence in the web revival community, mostly to test it out, as up until that point I only knew of Neocities and though that this site could also be nice to use.
Right now, I am in the process of transferring my DoL site from there to web 1.0 hosting (the original site is already down, but the new one is still a work in progress due to wanting to make a site a bit differently), due to me not wanting to be there anymore.
Other than being an alternative place for Neocities (something that is good, as competition will drive the site to be better) there are some other perks to this too. It allows other files to be hosted on the site, notably mp3, with a free plan, something you would need a supporter role on Neocitites. Here is a more detailed post on the differences between the two sites, mostly so that I don't spend more time here talking about it. The only notable thing I will add that has changed since this is that there is no more $1 tier, and is now only the $3 one. For some people, this is a lot cheaper and better than Neocities, alongside other perks it has.
Fist part: supporter roles aren't much for me. I am in a situation where purchasing any supporter role for either Neocities or Nekoweb isn't an option for the time being. I do plan at some point to get it, mostly so that I can host my own fanfic archive on there, alongside my main site being linked to it (additionally moving the joscarl archive over to the main account than it being a side one) but it's not something that's necessary at the moment. This concept won't go away, and even if I change fandoms and interests, there will always be something new for me to write about and be worthy of being posted on my own fanfic archive. As of now, I have a dreamwidth community for it too, so that is a replacement until I can make one here.
Second part: most of the perks, both for free and supporter accounts on Nekoweb, don't interest me much. I don't have the need to host .exe or mp3 files on my site (and while the latter could change at some point, I can always find alternative ways to do it). More sites is the one thing I'd do at some point, regardless of what host I'd use, but as that isn't an option now, I can't even think of that as a good reason to use it over Neocities, especially since I'd most likely be a supporter for one month. If you want to be a supporter in the long run, sure, Nekoweb might be a better option, but if you plan to do it once, you can just do whichever, as $2 are not a significant difference to me at least. I understand to someone else it might be though.
Third part: Their support being mostly on Discord and the fact that they can be mean sometimes when you ask them questions. I don't care much that they have a Discord community, I use it too. But the fact that if you want to have any sort of support for a problem to be solved, you have to have it instead of sending an email or making a post on a forum, is bad to me. I've never had the need to send an email to support for anything, but the fact that I'd have to use Discord, a chatting app, for that, does not sound good to me at all. Not to mention that if someone doesn't have it and doesn't want to make an account for just this, they can't get immediate support. Now, on the mean part: on the forum I use, someone commented on a thread related to static websites on how they received a mean comment from one of the admins on the server when asking a question related to hosting, and was met with a very rude attitude about it. That's enough for me to know what I should expect from them if I had a more serious question or problem
Fourth part: this one is actually the most important to me, and pretty much a deal breaker, but the reason I left it for last is because the topic itself is not for everyone.
This is found in their Terms of Service:
No "lolicon", "shotacon" or any sexual content regarding minors.
One word: censorship. Not allowing csem is understandable, no one would be surprised of that, but fictional characters do not count as that. One is allowed to be uncomfortable by that, you just have to avoid sites that host that kind of stuff.
Remember how I said I would want to archive my fics on my own archive? Nekoweb would make that impossible because a lot of my fics fall under shotacon (for my main ship at that) category. I am a huge advocate for tagging and making warnings for everything, and that's something I would both redesign my site for and add on my fic archive when it becomes a thing. Being anti- censorship is something I've always been an advocate for, regardless of what fictional content is being written, even before I myself was writing that stuff.
The initial reason I didn't delete my Nekoweb account is because I was not about to make another Neocities one. as I already had two at the time I was considering making it. After a good thought about it, I decided to just download my archive and now start from scratch on a different host that is free. How that goes, I will see. That site doesn't get much updates as I'm not as big DoL player or do I keep up with is as much as more regular players do, but I have an au dedicated to it with my OTP from a different game, so the occasional updates will be there one way or another.
I do not want to be associated with a site that allows censorship, specifically when I'm here writing what I write. Sometimes, those things are inevitable, but if I have a choice (and I do have it now) I will pick the other choice. One day, the site might get transferred to Neocities, and until then, it will be somewhere else.
That is all.
