Purspose: The search forms on this site will redirect you to duckduckgo and will allow you to search personal web pages hosted on the subdomains of free webhosts like blogspot and wordpress. I am aware that duckduckgo is involved in political censorship but since the purpose of this page is to do anime searches, that doesn’t really matter. Besides you shouldn’t even bother with politics.
List of Search Forms
- Geocities
- Wordpress
- Tripod
- Angelfire
- Neocities
- Blogger/Blogspot
- Altervista
- Google Sites
- Substack
- Hubpages
- Weebly
Motivation: I have purposefully avoided including any website communities like forums (with a few exceptions like livejournal) because people’s personal sites usually have a more individual view of the author because most people who write personal sites don’t expect anyone to read most of their blogs. People are more likely to say what they actually think when they think nobody is looking.
Even on anonymous imageboards the freedom given by your anonymity is evened out by the need to fit in with the community’s unofficial guidelines. If you don’t fit in then you will awkwardly trip over the heresies on those sites and be to be told to “lurk moar.”
Sites like wordpress and neocities skirt the line because people who disagree with each other tend to just avoid each other. For example, I occasionally get a hate mail comment or two but nothing enough to dissuade me from saying the things I want to say.
S-tier web-hosts
These are the sites you are most likely to find some good blog posts on. Naturally they are very old and some of them are no longer online, like the venerable Geocities. Hopefully none more will go offline because even if they get archived somewhere like on archive.org - that doesn’t really matter if they are not indexed on a search engine- no one will find them. Fortunately there was enough enthusiasm for people to mirror the content on geocities so it is searchable
Search Geocities
Geocities was a 90s free web host which let many people create their first personal websites.
Search wordpress.com
Wordpress.com is full of ads so use an adblocker, nevertheless a key part of the history of anime blogging occured on that site.
Search Tripod
It used to be a free web host in the 90s but now it is a paid thing. I think a few people just got locked into the system when they set up their blogs and that’s what keeps them afloat. The free sites which were made back in the 90s are still up.
Search Angelfire
Angelfire is an ancient free webhost which gives a 20 mb of free space. It’s by the same guys who run Tripod.
Search Neocities
Neocities doesn’t have the most content since it’s a newcomer to webhosting. There are a few actively updated anime sites which get a lot of views but frankly far too many with too little content. Nevertheless I have met some nice people here. If you look something up for some anime which is not popular you are unlikely to find anything related to it tbh but you might find an interesting site about something else.
B-tier web hosts.
Inbetween S and F. These ones have some good stuff but some also have spam sites or have commercial content like,“Top 10 X Anime List.”
Search Blogger/Blogspot:
Blogspot is probably the best service that google provides, and just like youtube (the second best google service) google did not create it but bought it. There are some good blog posts here but unfortunately many poor people and scammers/spammers have taken advantypee of the free web hosting to host sites with content scraped from other sites and so on.
Search Altervista (Italian)
Altervista is an Italian web hosting provider which has been around for longer than you might think. There are many good things about them like the generous storage and features but what I don’t like about them is that they delete inactive sites which means that many nice old websites are lost there. Just as with Blogger/Blogspot there’s quite a few spamy sites on there unfortunately. Many websites on there are in Italian but there’s some English ones too.
Search Google Sites
Google Sites is a free website builder. It recently got updated to remove many useful features. Anyhow there’s quite a few old anime sites which look nice enough. Unfortunately there’s also sites which are just empty, or just have some links on them. I think the first site I made was on Google Sites by finding a link to it on my gmail account.
F-tier Webhosts
These webhosts are more modern webhosts which means that they have worse sites on them generally. For example Substack is full of politically motivated content which is naturally pandering to one group or the other as opposed to just the author’s interest in media, the politics comes firts and the art last. These sites also have inferior website layouts (to pander to phone-users), more privacy-invading website tracking, higher loading times, and more ads.
Search Substack
Substack is a newsletter site with the blogs/sites being an afterthought. This shows pretty obviously in the extremely bland “minimalist” uniform website layouts that all sites hosted there have. Just by not banning people they have cornered a certain rightwing niche market. I like how the creators of the site seem to be able to shut up about their own politics cough gab cough epik.com cough and just provide a service. I also like how the sites are not connected to each other (like on social media) meaning that authors may develop an individual voice. Some kind of website directory would be welcome though you can basically search for sites using the form I have provided below.
I don’t like my mailbox to be full of email newsletters which is why my own e-mail newsletter is just a monthly one. Fortunately substack sites have RSS feeds, so just add “/feed” to the substack site url or use an extension like feedbro which can find feeds on sites.
Search Hubpages
Hubpages is an ad-revenue sharing site. Most of the articles read like “Top 10 anime that…” etc… Despite that I cannot really hate them. It’s basically a start-up which never took off. If the writers actually made money through the articles I imagine that they would be much worse articles. This is what happened to platforms like steemit. They tried a bunch of stuff like setting up different websites for different topics - so that google wouldn’t judge them as a content farm site. Their main site gets barely 2 million views a month. I just like the fact that they didn’t give up and shut down the platform because of this. I think they should have put a higher emphasis on writing better articles, editing articles more than worrying about what google is doing but credit is due where credit it due. There’s some articles recommending/reviewing mid-2000s anime.
Search Weebly
A website builder that used to be popular. Once again this shows why you shouldn’t use platforms like weebly which can go out of fashion at any time. If you are going to use something unecessarily complicated then at least use some open source software like wordpress which will be around a while. Still there’s some nice personal anime sites. Weebly came out at the peak of mid-2000s blogging websites with multiple columns, “wap” pages for mobile phones and so on. I also like the fact that these are personal sites rather than blogs. One of my early sites where I actually cared was on weebly so I can say that the “drag-n-drop” website builder was actually nice - though if I tried to use it now it would probably just get in the way. I and a lot of other people were impressed by it - but something didn’t feel right so I left. Also please don’t use wix (the more “modern” competitor to weebly), that is if you want a long-lasting website. If you must use a website service like that at least use wordpress.com or squarespace which will probably be around for the next 10 years minimum.
Closing Thoughts
This page was made possible due to the fact that I had come across this deleted wikipedia page before it was deleted for not fitting into “wikipedia’s standards.” It has a useful, if out of date, table comparing the different free web hosting providers.
Before setting up this website here on neocities I wasted a long time trying to find the right web host for my site. I think that I have found it now in neocities but I wish that I had spent that time writing rather than researching different free web hosts and worrying whether I was using the right web host. At least I got this article out of all that trouble I went through.
The last web host I used before coming here was the Yahoo! Japan Geocities service which shut down on March 31, 2019. Unfortu as far as I am aware Yahoo! Japan Geocities sites did not get archived anywhere systematically. Maybe they did but they are probably in Japanese. I don’t know what Yahoo! Japan Geocities was like in its heyday was like but by the end it was a clean, simple file uploader and nothing more. There wasn’t any community or way to find other sites. I am not against web directories, in fact they are useful, but you need to keep the social aspects to a minimum or the pernal flair of the content will be lost.
Sites which I considered adding but then removed from this page: Tumblr: I am rarely linked to some interested posts from tumblr like a shot by shot analysis of a movie scene but for the most part it was a social media site where everyone was concerned what everyone else on the site was doing so it hasn’t aged well. I feel like to an extent if it’s harder to connect with others on a site that counts for more, especially if it’s one to one, like through email rather than part of some group.Livejournal: Another platform I considered using for a long time but the communal aspects put me off. The main reason that I decided to avoid adding it here is that most of the content is low effort stuff which hasn’t aged well, like posting a bunch of screenshots from an anime and gushing “WOW!” or “OMG!,” that sort of thing.
[top]