NeoPages.net is back. After a huge hiatus due to a lack of time on my part (and also a huge server hack/crash), I finally had time over the break to get my stuff together and try to get the ball rolling again.

NeoPages.net is a free selective hosting service. Basically the lifeblood of the whole network is in its forums, where NP members vote in a new member each week. A member gets a "lifetime" (loosely definition: "as long as i can support it") hosting account with NeoPages.net (I think they get 50mb space, 5gb bandwidth per month, php, mysql, the usual works). It's a great social experiment in organic growth, which was really thriving before I had to shut it down last year (I think, does someone know the exact date?).

I created NeoPages.net originally (archive.org shows that by november 2001 the site was up, which is close enough) because I thought there was not a free host that was full-featured enough (and free!) for users that really wanted to become amateur webdesigners. Geocities, Xoom, Fortunecities were the only alternatives at the time, and these were hardly conducive to developing any type of useful skills. Furthermore, I knew that the people who were the most passionate about learning for the web were those who couldn't afford the tools (most parents weren't entirely willing to pay money so their kids could host a website, and most kids didn't have access to CCs).

The most exciting aspect of the whole project was how it organized itself so organically. I handled everything via email in the beginning, but as the number of people who wanted hosting grew, I had trouble fielding all the requests for help, so I created a forum. Then when server space started getting tight, I had to find a way to limit membership, and thus the whole 'applications' process was borne. More than anything, the applications process was merely a smokescreen to help screen me from people who obviously were just looking to freeload. There were plenty of times when I went through the weekly voting and just took everybody I felt deserved the hosting.

In any case, the community became extremely efficient; I had a whole nice command-structure set up (thanks, Quiller!) so I wouldn't have to deal with the grunt work of sorting applications and dealing with the voting. There were admins who kept phpBB patched and installed forum updates (thanks Brian!), and then all the existing members made sure the quality of applicants was strong (thanks to everybody!).

You'd be really surprised at what 15/16/17 year olds can accomplish... they managed to remain quite civil and open-minded across different cultures (NeoPages had a really spread-out community all across the globe, represented from India, Indonesia, the Middle East, etc. etc.; does anybody have that guestmap link still?), and managed to keep the organization from eating itself up (heh, hello Kyle!) and dealt with problems on its own. (And I haven't even talked about their design and webdesign skills!)

Of course, this all came to a crashing (pun!) halt when the server that everybody was hosted on got hacked ... I screwed up the backup of the HD and I ended up borking a bunch of people's mySQL dbs. After that, I just lost the will and energy to set everything back up again... plus it was a huge drain on my finances (at the time, I was still a student, so $110/month was a huge hit).

But, now I have a job! And we've moved the primary hosting over to Network Redux; because it's a "shared" server, Network Redux handles backups and keeps the server patched for me... so basically my role has largely been reduced to paying the bills and keeping things organized, although Quiller has been taking a huge role in keeping the forum organized and dealing with server set-up, although I would imagine sometime in the future he'd want to offload some of the responsibilities to other people as well.

And wow, I just wrote an incredibly long post when all I wanted was to say: NeoPages.net is back! Let the free hosting begin once again!.

Everytime the community crashed and burned (for various reasons), it came back quite strong. We've learned lessons each time, and now ... I think we've got a really good system for keeping things going indefinitely (keep your fingers crossed).