Today marks the day (after) ComicServer Muncie 15 was released. There have been zero major updates since.
To me, ComicServer being deprecated is a bittersweet thing. Bitter, because I have worked on it since 2020, and it sort of jumpstarted my endeavors in website design. Since then, my other projects have only gotten better and better. Among Us was a fail (not unexpectedly), but TuneGram, Cursori, and even branches and versions of ComicServer like ComicServer Daily and Cesium (not to mention Muncie) simply define what I set out to accomplish with ComicServer.
The time of ComicServer was over by January of this year, and it goes further than just ComicServer. The niche segment of “Freemium Server Hosting” was and is disappearing fast after exploding during the pandemic. Sites like Replit, Heroku, and the like used to include $0/month plans with limits perfect for beginner hosting. Now, that has mostly disappeared. A handful of sites offer it, Glitch being the most pronounced among them. If one was looking to avoid Glitch, there are a lot of static web hosting services with support for functions, a very hacky way of incorporating server-side JavaScript into a static site. Some of these services are Netlify, Cloudflare Workers, and Firebase.
Post-ComicServer, I have found solace in Cloudflare Workers for dynamic websites with ample limits (if just a bit botched), GitHub Pages for static websites like TuneGram and Cursori which may use APIs, but all client-side, and GitHub Actions for ComicServer Daily, at it’s core, a cron job which really only needs to run once a day for eternity, and with Actions’ amazing computing limits, I begin to wonder why I didn’t abandon Replit sooner.
In short, after only four years in the realm of remote server hosting, and a majority of that time on once-great Replit, I’m beginning to feel outdated in this rapidly fluctuating area of the internet, and also a bit sentimental of the times that I could run ComicServer 24/7 for absolutely free*.
* Not including the (probably) massive amount of data harvested from my use on these platforms.