Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Neocities vs GitHub Pages, the Slant community recommends GitHub Pages for most people. In the question“What are the best website hosting providers?” GitHub Pages is ranked 1st while Neocities is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose GitHub Pages is:
One of GitHub's features is a very powerful web editor which helps users edit or even create files right from the web browser, once the file is saved it's the same as a commit. Coupled with pages, this tool becomes even more powerful, giving users a free CMS that is easy to use and create.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free tier
Neocities has a free tier which provides hosting for up to 1GB of space and tools for website building.
Pro Easy to use drag and drop interface
Neocities uses a drag and drop interface to upload files on their server. This makes it arguably the best option for beginners for it's ease of use.
Pro Lively community
Neocities also has a social aspect allowing for discovery of your site and interaction with and learning from others.
Pro The ability to create and edit files on the web UI gives GitHub pages the same power as a small CMS
One of GitHub's features is a very powerful web editor which helps users edit or even create files right from the web browser, once the file is saved it's the same as a commit. Coupled with pages, this tool becomes even more powerful, giving users a free CMS that is easy to use and create.
Pro Supports Jekyll
A simple, blog-aware static site generator, Jekyll makes it easy to create site-wide headers and footers without having to copy them across every page. It also offers some other advanced templating features.
Pro Supports custom domains
A custom domain can be added by creating a CNAME file with the necessary domain in the root of the repository and adding/changing corresponding DNS entries.
Pro Free tier
Static websites can be hosted on GitHub Pages for free as long as the repository is public. Private repositories start at $7/mo.
Pro Allows for all the git features when building your site, too
Cons
Con Custom domains not free
User must sign up for paid plan ($5/mo) to use their own domain.
Con Supports a limited selection of file types
Neocities only supports a limited number of file types. So for types not supported, third party services need to be used.
Con No SFTP support
Neocities has no SFTP support. In stead it uses a drag and drop web based interface, which is a nice tradeoff for beginners. It's not very useful for more advanced users though.
Con Unable to set cache expiry, must accept GitHub defaults (which are short)
Low cache expires - GitHub sets the cache-control: max-age header to 600 seconds, or ten minutes. Normally, you would set this value to a year so that it stays cached, and then use fingerprinting on your assets. Instead of serving style.css, you would serve something like style-62c887ea7cf54e743ecf3ce6c62a4ed6.css. As it stands now, assets are rarely going to be cached on repeat visits.
This will give a low score on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights with a 'should fix' recommendation around 'Leverage browser caching'.
For a high traffic site this may have implications
