So far I know of Github pages and Gitlab pages where you can host a blog for free.
I think medium you can also publish a blog on there, but never actually tried it.
neither github, gitlab or medium are private. stay away from those.
specially from medium. medium has been trying to centralize and paywall the previous decentralized and open blog ecosystem.
I recommend bearblog.dev which is more akin to Medium, where you don’t need to create the website, you just write the content.
neocities.org is more similar to github pages, they host a static site for free. Although you’d be better by using a cheap VPS.
Avoid the likes of tumblr, netlify, vercel and a long etc. They all have important privacy issues or open access of information.
What’s wrong with GitLab?
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Website hosting companies tend to need your real name, real address, and real billing info to verify those things are correct. Isnt Medium more private, because you don’t need to feed it any of that?
No, if you know where to look. Medium is just awful. There are too many things wrong with Medium that I won’t elaborate here, but I’ll leave some sources:
- https://tosdr.org/en/service/1003
- https://nomedium.dev/
- https://www.cdevn.com/why-medium-actually-sucks/
The alternatives that I recommend on my comment have decent privacy policies and are not even close as an abuser as Medium is. They are also free software.
Here there are some decent server providers recommendations for self-hosters which require nor your real name or billing address in case anyone is interested.
How much traffic do you expect? An old laptop and DDNS service would have you covered.
Depending on what they mean by “private” throwing i2p on there instead of ddns might be just the ticket.
Then you can register a “domain” on reg.i2p with something like yourname.i2p as well.
What are you trying to do?
- Static files? Then GitLab/GitHub pages will be fine. There are also many providers like Netlify that specialized in static sites.
- “Live” application like self-hosted WordPress? Then you will need to find a server provider where you can configure and run it.
- Managed hosting of open source software. If you don’t want to maintain the blog software yourself it is pretty easy to find people that host common blogging software like https://wordpress.com.
- SaaS blogging. Then you just sign up like https://medium.com, https://blogger.com or https://tumblr.com
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why’d this get downvotes
Recommending Medium and Blogger in a privacy community is terrible advice. It’s disappointing that this is actually getting upvoted.
Edit: The other two comments provide actual private recommendations. This comment would be fine outside a privacy community.
have you looked at the community? this is c/privacy and they recommended blogger lol
Because in spite of the question (“private host” as opposed to “privacy friendly host”), people have commented in the context of privacy (probably because of the community we’re on); and in that context, the mere mention of github or gitlab is met with downvotes.
IMHO using github or gitlab for that isn’t much of a concern privacy wise (at least not more than browsing a website from the companies behind those services), but it surely is when it comes to data integrity (which is a totally separate concern, but people often confuse it with privacy, like they also do with security). I would not trust either service with that.
@GreyTechnician @privacy define “private host providers”
Has being in privacy circles not taught you that private and free don’t get along?
Companies dont donate server space, bandwidth and all the other hosting costs just to be nice.
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