Neocities Alternatives for a Personal Page (and When to Stay)

hdply · 2026-09-08

Neocities exists to keep the personal web alive — hand-written HTML, a file manager, a built-in editor, and a community of people browsing each other's sites. If that description makes you happy, stop reading and go make a site there; it is good at exactly this. This page is for people who want a personal page but not the community around it, or who want something online before they have decided to commit to anything. Numbers were checked on Neocities' supporter page on 2026-09-08.

What Neocities gives you

A free account includes 1 GB of storage and 200 GB of bandwidth a month, with a restricted set of allowed file types. The Supporter plan is $5/month and raises that to 50 GB storage and 3,000 GB bandwidth, allows any file type, and adds custom domains with SSL. Every site gets a profile page, can be followed by other members, and appears in the site directory — the community is a feature, not a side effect.

You need an account before anything is live, and your site's URL is yourname.neocities.org.

Where it may not fit

The directory. A hand-made homepage belongs in it. A client proposal, a report for your team or a mockup for one person does not — those want a link only the recipient knows.
The tone. The neocities.org address and the community framing read as hobbyist. That is a compliment for a personal site and a mismatch for anything you send in a work context.
Account first. Fine for a home you plan to keep. Slow when you just want to check how a page looks on a phone before sending it.

Alternative 1: hdply

hdply is a single-page host with no community layer: paste HTML, get name.hdply.com, done. There is no directory and new pages are hidden from search engines until you choose otherwise, so a link is seen by the people you send it to. You can try without an account (the link lasts an hour); a free account keeps six sites permanently with a browser editor and version history. Light is $1/month for 25 sites and Pro $7/month for unlimited.

What you give up: one file per site and 1 MB per page — no images folder, no separate CSS files, no custom domain. A multi-page personal site with a gallery is a folder, and Neocities is the better host for a folder.

Better than Neocities when: you want a page that is private-by-default, or you are sharing in a professional context, or you want to see it live before you decide to keep it.

Alternative 2: GitHub Pages

Free hosting with custom domains, if you are comfortable with Git. Personal sites live in a repository named yourname.github.io. There is no community directory, and the workflow gives you a full history of every change. The cost is learning Git if you do not already know it — see GitHub Pages alternatives for that trade-off in detail.

Alternative 3: Netlify Drop

Drag a folder, get a link. Multi-file sites work, a free account is enough for a personal site, and custom domains are supported. Without an account the URL is password-protected until claimed, so plan on signing up. Details in the Netlify Drop comparison.

Side by side

	Neocities	hdply	GitHub Pages
Community directory	Yes, built in	No	No
Hidden from search by default	No	Yes	No
Multiple files	Yes	No	Yes
Edit in the browser	Yes	Yes	Via the repository
Try without an account	No	Yes (1-hour link)	No
Custom domain	Supporter, $5/month	No	Yes, free
Free storage	1 GB	1 MB per page, 6 pages	1 GB per site

When Neocities is the better choice

Stay on Neocities if your site is a real homepage with several pages and images; if you enjoy the community and want people to find you through it; if you want a custom domain for $5/month from a host that also gives you an editor; or if the old-web spirit is the point. hdply hosts one page; Neocities hosts a place.

Moving one page over

Take the HTML for the page, inline its CSS and JavaScript, host the images at an absolute URL or as data URIs, and paste it in. Leave a redirect at the old address if the link was shared.