How do custom top level domains like you can get from Neocities work? For example, corru.observer and corru.works. My understanding is that making your own domain name is really hard or expensive, and a custom TLD is harder. And i’m pretty sure Neocities is run by one guy, so surely it can’t be that hard to set up a domain name as an individual.
domains are fairly inexpensive and easy to set up, and while ‘custom’ TLDs are extremely expensive (current round is hundreds of thousand of dollars per) none of those neocities TLDs are ‘custom’ TLDs. You could purchase a .observer or .works domain if you desired to. I am an individual and have my own domain. AMA.
Do you use your domain for anything besides a website?
Yes! I actually don’t host a website on my domain. Its purpose is purely for game servers I host for my friends.
I have multiple domains that I renew annually and I only use them for personal email hosting. I pay for an annual hosting package. I suggest Namecheap for hosting and to register a domain, either Namecheap or Namesilo. Stay away from GoDaddy. Neocities is a web presence site. We used to have Geocities and Yahoo/Yahoo Groups. MSN also did sites like this. It was all sponsored by advertising, and you owned nothing. A lot of the Geocities sites were fan sites, or creative people posting their art, music, photos, etc. You can pay $1-5000.00/a year for a TLD, but most run in the $10-20/a year range. Hosting is usually $50/a year and up.