Hosting Follow-up: Comic Genesis

Considering all the complaints about their service (or lack thereof), my placement of them near the top should give you an idea of the quality of other comic hosting services. In spite of their downtimes and incorrectly displayed comics, Comic Genesis has all the right components. (Note that I don't write a webcomic, and have never used the services in question; all I know about their features come from what I've seen.)

Comic Genesis provides great design flexibility: frequently a webcomic will have character bios, artwork, and many other pages beyond the comic strip. The design flexibility also allows the comic page to be customized to best fit the work being displayed. On the other hand, this opens up potential problems, like page-destroying HTML errors and poor site design. Pleasantly enough, only a small patch of text-adds is added into the page (how many free servers do that?).

Most Comic Genesis pages (I have seen it overridden) use a timestamp for filenames; a big plus in my opinion. The tiny calendars are another added bonus, letting you jump through the comics quickly or determine the actual update frequency.

Comics hosted by Comic Genesis get a nice, short URL: abcxyz.comicgen.com. It's only one word to type and case-insensitive, very little to get wrong.

Comic Genesis, however, is well known for their malfunctioning servers, leaving authors unable to update, and occasional crashes where nothing can be seen at all. Luckily these have diminished over time (though not eliminated).