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What hosts are out there for your webcomic and what sort of features do they boast?

So now that you have your script and a few pages of art, you’re ready to let your webcomic go public to the internet. But, woe be, you realize you can’t do that unless you have a webpage. And blast it — you’re an artist… not a website coder! You want to spend your time putting art up for people to enjoy… not worrying about the technical hoopla behind how it gets there!

Luckily, there are a lot of great free webcomic hosts that allow you to do just that. In fact, most of them give users a wonderful choice – offering pre-made templates for artists who may have little experience with website design… while also giving those who want to learn or already know how to design a site the flexibility to create their own layout and templates. The best of both worlds!

And here are the ones I’m most familiar with, in alphabetical order:

Comic Dish

The new kid on the block, so to say. And it sure is a site brimming with a LOT of nice features including:

• Unlimited space/bandwidth
• Own and/or Assist multiple comics
• Rating system
• Comment system
• Pre-Made Templates & User Made Template sharing system
• Flexible site design
• No Ads
• Personal Blog & Artist Notes
• Favorite Comics List

For a full list of features, click here.

I like a lot of things that this host has to offer. There were a few things they needed to work on, however. It’s super easy to create a comic, but it took me a while to figure out where to click to upload a page. I think they should make that a tad more obvious.

Secondly, the comic files must be named in the format of “YYYYMMDD” – which posts them on the date specified by the file name. This is fine in general… unless you’re someone like me that has 800 pages of comic in an archive. If I were to try to use this host for a long-established comic, that would mean I’d have to go back and rename every page in my archive to match this format specification!

If I were to make a brand new comic though, I’d certainly be giving this one a shot. The features alone really catch my interest.

Comic Genesis

Launched in 2000 as KeenSpace, and relaunched in 2005, with the name of Comic Genesis. This is the one that I keep hearing is the biggie… if nothing else, simply due to their KeenSpace history. However, I’ve never used this site for a few different reasons.

One, is that they don’t seem to have a comment system built into their template. I could be wrong about that… but in viewing various comics, the sites that did have comment systems were either outlinked to tag boards or live journals. I could see that they had a fairly flexible template-editing system as some of the pages were designed pretty complex. Their standard template was pretty plain, however, compared to some of the other hosts I’ve used and looked through.

Also, the signup process is a bit more long-winded than the insta-account hosts I’m used to. They ask for real name, address and phone number during the signup process, which might be a turn off to some people. They also want one sample comic page to be uploaded – I don’t know if they decline people based on quality or if they just want to know that you actually have work to post.

They do offer unlimited hosting and free forums… as well as sporting the KeenSpace name, if that is something that does matter to you.

If you’ve used Comic Genesis and have a review or personal thoughts on their system, please let me know. I doubt I’ll sign up for this one as I have too many other accounts already.

Drunk Duck

Another biggie host that’s been around for a while, though not as long as KeenSpace. I’ve hosted mirrors to both of my comics with Drunk Duck on both the new and the old version of the site. So I have a fairly good idea of all the features this host has – and it’s a lot:

• Unlimited space/bandwidth
• Own and/or Assist multiple comics
• Rating system
• Comment system
• Private Messages
• Pre-Made Templates
• Flexible site design
• Favorite Comics List
• Top Lists
• Large Community

Over time, Drunk Duck gained the interest of Platinum Studios, and it was purchased from its founder. Since then, there’s been an increased number of ads all over the website and individual comic pages… and a focus on the comics that Platinum Studios wishes to advertise and produce. It’s a showcase for their artists’ work… at least, it’s really come to feel like that to me.

The community has also ballooned to the point that it’s so easy to get lost in the crowd there. If you want to get noticed, you have to work fairly hard at networking. When the site first reopened, my comics experienced a fairly healthy stream of readers, comments and traffic. But over time, I’ve found a trend of less and less comments across the medium-sized and lesser-known comics as a whole. If you’re not one of the big 10, it feels difficult to get attention, even if you update every single day. And if you’re not in the big 25, chances are you’re going to find it very difficult to push your way up the ranks.

It’s a great host with a lot of features if you can overlook the useless rating system and the traffic-driven rankings… which, if you try to become a part of the overall community, is a very difficult thing to ignore. Part of the reason I’ve looked at so many other hosts was because I’m not sure how effective it’s been putting time into updating my DD mirrors anymore. I’ve been curious if there’s another site that isn’t so cluttered and saturated out there. But just because these are my feelings, don’t let that stop you from checking them out!

Night Gig

NightGig originally started a free host to artists and artistic projects – including webcomics. They run on a Wordpress/Comicpress system which allows for templates as well as website flexibility. It also allows for comments and a few other nice features. The site is closed to free hosting at this point, but appears to allow for sign-ups whenever space and bandwidth costs allow.

For more information, click here.

Smack Jeeves

When Drunk Duck crashed out on us for a while, a number of us turned to this newer host, Smack Jeeves, to take its place. I did make an account there and considered moving my comic to that server as a mirror at one point. At that time, their server somewhat slow, and the user interface felt a tad clunky to me coming from Drunk Duck. So I never did go through with the investment of time to put up a comic on this site.

A fair amount of time has passed since then. I can see that their site speed is far improved now. I can’t comment on the user interface, but it’s a good chance that it may have also been tweaked.

I hear a lot of good things about this host. I know it has a number of features such as:

• Unlimited space/bandwidth
• Own and/or Assist multiple comics
• Rating system
• Comment system
• Private Messages
• Artist’s News page
• Pre-Made Templates
• Flexible site design
• Favorite Comics List
• Multiple Kinds of Top Lists

For more information on features and sign up, click here.

Webcomics Nation

I’d like to say that I could review this host. But though I signed up for an account, I never got the confirmation email that allowed me to log into the site. So I didn’t get any hands-on time with this system. From what I can see looking at the accounts, they do have a very basic template that can be tweaked to do awesome things, if you know how. Some of the features I could pick out:

• Comment System
• Basic Template
• Flexible site design
• Tooncasting option
• Update Calendar

There ARE advertising banners on the comic pages and you don’t have the ability to remove them or place your own unless you upgrade to a paid account there.

For more information about this host, click here.

Sites like these are really a great place to start out for artists looking to learn website design and coding. In fact, this is how I originally taught myself HTML – between a tiny do-it-yourself hosted webpage and a bunch of online tutorials. It becomes part of the fun of running your own webcomic, if that kind of thing interests you. And it doesn’t hurt to look into it. The worst that could happen if you mess up the code is that you can choose to go back to a default template and nothing will be hurt!

Oh… and if there is a host that I’ve overlooked, please let me know. I’m always interested in learning about more opportunities out there!

Good luck with your host of choice!

Posted by Aywren

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