Hosting Follow-up: Webcomics Nation

So another hosting service for webcomics is around: Webcomics Nation an offshoot of the pay site Modern Tails. At the moment, it remains one of the smaller sites. It has a couple nice features, but after the flaws there's not enough to place it above the others. Even more so that they charge a monthly fee that's LARGER than most commercial hosting services (sure they offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth, but all the commercial services I've looked up offer over 5 GB disk space and 100 GB bandwidth for less).

First the good points: first is the ability to customize the pages and add in extra material (of the three services I mentioned previously, only Comic Genesis allowed this). It's a non-trivial advantage. Having a quick reference for characters and story lines can be a great help, and it is not terrible hard to implement. Next, all the comics by one author are grouped together. Finding other works by the same author isn't always easy. Many times, the comics are meant to be accessed via the author's main page, not linked directly as often happens. Other times, the links for the author's other works are just inconspicuous (no harm in that, bold links can get annoying).

But the flaws are many; most damaging is the URL. Webcomicsnation is pretty long by itself (almost twice the size of 'comicgen') appended to that URL is the author's name and the comic's name (along with a massive string of data for archived pages). Try to record the address of any specific comic and you have to add on a long string of variables. And those variables aren't even simple counters or timestamps, but another incarnation of the mysterious id numbers I've complained about before. Also, some users have the system setup for a chapter-at-a-time display rather than page-at-a-time...you end up downloading twenty large image files, just to check on one strip.

Aside from the difficulties stemming from the hideous URL, webcomicsnation has as good a feature set as the other services and is just a tad less reliable in terms of server outages (though that may decrease over time). It's certainly not a bad choice, especially if you intend on working on several projects which must be kept separate. However, it seems better suited for a comic-book style rather than the steady pace that most webcomics take. Monetary-wise, you'd probably be better off getting a cheap hosting service and use one of the webcomic automation scripts available.