These are the ones I could find, webring hosts. There are two which most interest me: alt-webring and CrickRock. But here is the list for you to procrastinate over.
CrickRock It looks nice and they say they cleaned up a lot of dead rings. That in itself perked my interest. Other bigger services are full of deadwood/ dead rings.
Ringsurf was (maybe still is) offering dead rings out as adoptable but I didn’t have much luck with their software. I gave up on rings I tried to start there (more than a year ago) cause the HTML was not working for me somehow.
WebRing I actually started with WebRing this morning. I thought I would do a ring there cause they are sizeable and likely my ring would be found on their server as opposed to lesser known host. But, I was not allowed to start a ring there. According to WebRing I am not experienced enough to run a ring. (You must be an active member of at least 2 rings, which I am actually.) However, what WebRing does not know is that I’ve been a member of several rings over the years and I have run a ring through their service before, during and after they were a part of Yahoo. Anyway, I won’t host a ring where I’m not wanted. pathetic sniffle, sob
Lord of the Rings This one had a different name in the Dmoz listing but I changed it cause they seem to have gone with this name. Not sure if they will be told to change it at a later date. It doesn’t seem very active, the webrings in the directory weren’t that interesting, to me at least. Also, the directory layout is a copy of CrickRock and alt-webring but both of those services appear better moderated.
Ringo Possibly abandoned. The rings I tried to look at were not active. Two out of three never loaded at all and the third had zero sites in the ring, not even a site for the ring owner. So, I will leave this one to gather dust bunnies.
Bravenet’s Webrings are just kind of clunky and spammy. WebRing itself isn’t much better as far as spam. But, though I want to like Bravenet I always end up choosing not to use them. There is the whole thing about it being free and not expecting something free to come without some disadvantages (ads) but if you can find a free service without the blunky (blocky/ clunky) ads, which would you choose?
alt-webring runs on Ringlink for one thing. Ringlink is webring software offered free. But, you have to have a domain which lets you use CGI to run the ring from. So, if you have a blog on your domain you can also host your own ring, without any of these free hosting services. But, I don’t have that option presently. I like alt-webring anyway, it’s simple and clean looking and the rings in the directory look interesting.