Good webhost that allows NSFW etc content?

June 22, 2023 6:07 AM

Snowflake details within. Not looking to run a porn site! Just want to make a personal site that may have some NSFW fan art and stuff like that.

I'm willing to pay money

I don't really know what the landscape for webhosts looks like, so if there's an obvious answer, apologies :P

my needs are not super intense. this is just a little personal website and blog I wanted to put together...especially with imgur potentially deleting NSFW/old content, a lot of people have been talking about hosting such stuff oneself, which has been part of a bigger desire to own a bit more of my digital presence. I don't imagine I will get much traffic and again it won't be some porn emporium (empornium?), just maybe showing off various fan art or commissions.

I am pretty technical, though I'm not looking to do anything super complex (and honestly, while I am a programmer, web apps are not my forte, especially fancy networking...but this should be within my realm of expertise). But I definitely want ssh access and the ability to run server(s) myself--I am not looking to do wordpress or something like that. The big cloud providers seem pretty expensive (unless you're in the free tier, of course), and NSFW seems like it's no good?

If there are any other important variables in selecting a provider I will clarify in response.

posted by damedeshou to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Dreamhost will gladly host anything that isn't illegal.
posted by mkb at 7:46 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

https://nearlyfreespeech.net isn't going to bother you unless they get a DCMA notice, subpoena, etc. It's not a beginner-friendly hosting service, though it sounds like that won't be an issue for you. Also, they bill by usage, so if your site is low traffic it may cost almost nothing. My hosting bill is about $1.50/month for a site that gets 125-150 visits a day.
posted by COD at 8:07 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

You can potentially get out of AWS under $10 a month if you can run on micro instances and will have a 1 year free tier runway too. I do not know if that is expensive to you. It can't compare to $1.50 a month that's for sure. It would let you grow if you need and might give you some job-related experience that could come in handy for you in your career also. If you do stumble into needing to grow and handle more, AWS will gladly charge you more money to grow with you.

I think I've got a micro instance running 24/7 serving dynamic sites (wordpress, php, node), run 5 DNS domains out of AWS Route 53, and serve several static sites out of AWS S3. I also do cloud backup to S3 for my extended family. The micro instance runs mysql and nginx and fpm for php. Looking at my last AWS monthly bill, it was $7.85 for the micro instance, $7.26 for S3 storage (vast majority of this is the cloud backups), $0 for data transfer, and $2.53 for Route 53.

As long as your content isn't illegal, AWS is not going to care about NSFW, though they are a large company and if they start getting hassled, your little $10 a month isn't going to probably be worth it to them.

If you're optimizing for price, AWS probably won't be the choice for you, but if you have any more specific questions about how some of this stuff works in AWS, I might be able to answer.
posted by cmm at 9:48 AM on June 22, 2023

If you're up for hand edited static content you can link a Github project through Cloudflare pages to your own domain.
posted by gible at 4:43 PM on June 22, 2023

GitHub doesn't allow NSFW on their service, so maybe don't do that.
posted by Aleyn at 9:30 AM on June 23, 2023