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Comment by jgroome | Hacker News Reader

I ran a search for "site:geocities.com/Area51" to see if the old free hosting webpages are still alive. Found this gem:http://www.geocities.com/area51/3253/

It's very easy to look down our collective noses at Geocities, but I really feel I owe virtually everything I have to their free 2mb hosting. I learned the ins and outs of FTP from uploading my first webpages - webpages that taught me how HTML works. I did my best to hide their sponsor banners with my first JavaScript.

Everyone has access to their own Facebook profile and the like these days, so the idea of owning your own space on the Web is kind of archaic.

But is there still an equivalent of Geocities for modern Internet users?

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For me it was Angelfire, but basically the same thing.

IMO, the place to go today is PHPFog for their free Wordpress hosting. Wordpress as a CMS is a million times more sophisticated than Geocities, but when you're ready to make the jump into something more complicated you have access to the codebase (unlike Wordpress.com where you have to pay to customize the design).

Its funny that this topic came about. I remember the olden days as a kid where I would browse around looking for DBZ info. Almost every site seemed to be a Geocities or Angelfire blog.

Recently, I've been thinking about signing up for Angelfire to run the production blog for my website. You know, just as a gag. I'll have it look just like a site pre-2000s. This will be my nod to those sites that came before me.

My EYES! MY EYES! THEY BURRRRRRNNNN! http://rocdisjoint.angelfire.com/

I'd very much like to own my own space on the web. Particulary to run core things that really matter to me like device-sync, backup, basic sharing etc. I'm sure I could set something up using EC2/S3 but I don't want the hassle of maintenance (or to reinvent the wheel).

Edit: I'm kind of asking for an app-store-for-the-cloud but with a place that I own into which I 'install' the apps.

You could check out http://owncloud.org/

I am using cheap VPS for that, with debian (so it even has "apps" in aptitude :))

I cannot recommend it highly enough... it's great for doing quick perl experiments and even coding from phone/tablet through power of vi and screen, it's great for hosting personal projects that almost noone will visit

what I miss the most on my cheap vps is the ability to run java virtual machine, since it has smallish memory and is on openvz (so no swapping)

What VPS are you using? Is "cheap VPS" ~$20/month?

See http://www.lowendbox.com/ for < $10/m.

Look around, you'll find them. I found a Minecraft server host that actually gives me root access to a VPS with MC preinstalled. I disabled MC and now have a VPS with which to do what I please.

I don't know if it's the best deal out there because I haven't looked in a while, but the host I'm on is http://redstonehost.com/ if you're curious.

I am in Czech Republic, so it will probably be no use to you

I pay the equivalent of 7.39 USD/month

http://www.bezobav.cz/vps-virtualni-server.html

Isn't Tumblr the modern Geocities?

Sans the creativity.

Heh, obviously you've never used Tumblr before. Tons of people that I follow learn basic HTML and CSS by customizing their blog's theme, and the end result is insanely creative and unique blog layouts.

Not only that, but a lot of the content they're posting is original and creative as well. Whether it's original art, stories, poems, collages of gifs from a favorite TV show, etc, it's extremely easy (in my experience) to find creativity on Tumblr.

Your comment doesn't add to the discussion and is simply inaccurate.

You are still working around rules and a framework. Geocities gave you free run of HTML & JS to go nuts.

For example: Geocities accidently gave me my first experience designing backend as a service when I was a teenager.

I had built a website using some PHP but I had a budget of ~$0 for hosting and I couldn't find any free PHP webhosting that also offered mysql and didn't have extremely stringent bandwidth restrictions (I wanted to allow downloads of some fairly large .exes for VB6 games I had made) I used my home internet connection for playing online games so I didn't want people downloading files from that either.

My solution was to host all of the files and the front end of the site on geocities (which had a much better bandwidth limit but didn't support PHP) and redirect all of the POST forms to a Pentium2 linux box running off my home internet connection (with dyndns to take care of the dynamic IP issue). The form submission would sometimes (if it needed to update the site frontend) kick off a script which would FTP the new content to geocities. It could then just redirect you back to geocities once the form submission was done.

I believe you can get free hosting on Amazon, Google AppEngine, Heroku, etc. I'd say the learning curve is much steeper now however.

HTML was much easier in those days since people didn't really expect much from a website and tags/css was much more limited.

Want a bright pink page with flashing animated zombies? Just:

http://www.weebly.com/ has been quietly hosting millions of free websites for years. They're a YC company from back in the day (W2007), and an awesome bunch of folks with a really cool service.

Absolutely: Heroku gives away free instances.

http://www.heroku.com/

Rather than learn the basics of FTP kids today learn the basics of git deployment.

What is great about that site is that the site footer and all the annoying icons/ads/membership rings is longer then the body of the site.

The (now-discontinued) DropBox Public folders weren't too far off.

I'd say wordpress and tumblr are both close to equivalents?

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