Pastebin is still the right answer for a stack trace you need to send in the next ten seconds. It is the wrong one for anything a person has to read twice.
Three shapes that read badly in a paste box and well as a page. Pick one, replace the content, publish.
Markdown · headings, a decisions table, and a parked list.
Most people looking for a Pastebin alternative are not unhappy with Pastebin as a paste box. They hit one of three specific walls: the page is unreadable once the content is prose rather than code, the paste is public unless you remember not to make it, or they want to fix a typo and find there is no edit — only a new URL and a dead link in someone else’s chat.
Which alternative you want depends on which wall you hit. If it is privacy, PrivateBin encrypts in the browser and the server never sees the text. If it is editing, Rentry lets you keep the URL. If it is readability — you are pasting release notes, a runbook, a retro, something with headings and a table — then you do not want a paste box at all; you want the text rendered as a page. That is what dochost does: paste Markdown or HTML above, get a URL that renders like a document instead of a monospace wall.
An on-call engineer writes a post-incident summary at 3am: what broke, the four commands that diagnosed it, a table of affected regions, and the follow-ups. On Pastebin that arrives as one column of monospace text in which the table is not a table, the headings are not headings, and the four commands are visually identical to the prose around them — so the manager reading it on a phone at 7am scrolls, gives up, and asks for a summary of the summary.
The same text pasted here as Markdown renders as a document: the headings are navigable, the table is a grid, the commands sit in a code block that can be copied in one tap. Two hours later someone spots that a region was listed wrong — the engineer edits the page and the URL already in the incident channel now shows the correction, rather than a second link that half the thread will never see. What Pastebin still does better: if all you need is to dump 400 lines of raw log for a colleague to grep, its paste box is faster and nobody needs the output to be pretty.
Different jobs that overlap on one word — “paste”. The row that decides it is the first one: whether the output is meant to be read or to be grepped.
| dochost | Pastebin | |
|---|---|---|
| How the text renders | As a document — headings, tables, lists, highlighted code | As monospace text, with optional syntax highlighting |
| Editing after sharing | Yes, at the same URL, when signed in | Requires an account, and edits create a new paste for guests |
| Raw text endpoint | No plain-text mirror — the page is the artifact | Yes. /raw is why curl-into-pastebin workflows exist |
| Default visibility | Unlisted — only someone with the link | Public and indexed unless you change it |
| Expiry | 7 days free; permanent on a paid plan | Configurable, including never |
| Password protection | Yes, on a paid plan | Yes, on a paid plan |
Pick Pastebin for raw text a machine or a terminal will consume — logs, dumps, a config someone will curl. Pick dochost when a human has to read it and the structure matters: release notes, a runbook, an incident write-up, anything with a table in it.
Grouped by the wall you hit rather than by feature count. No price figures for the others: several are donation-funded or self-hostable, and any number here would be out of date fast.
Renders Markdown or HTML as a real page, and lets you edit it later at the same URL. No raw-text endpoint, so it is the wrong tool for piping logs.
Two decades of being the default is worth something: everyone recognises the link, the /raw endpoint is scriptable, and it never asks you to sign in first. Public by default, and prose reads terribly.
Encrypts in your browser and puts the key in the URL fragment, which is never sent to the server. The host genuinely cannot read your paste, and burn-after-reading actually burns. Lose the link and the content is gone for good — by design.
Markdown in, rendered page out, plus an edit code that lets you change it later without signing up. Closest in spirit to what this page recommends. We compared them in [Rentry vs dochost](/blog/rentry-vs-dochost). Keep the edit code or you lose the page; styling is fixed.
Real revision history, comments, forks, and embedding in other pages. If the paste is code and the audience is developers, it is hard to beat. See [GitHub Gist vs dochost](/blog/github-gist-vs-dochost). Secret gists are unlisted, not private — anyone with the URL can read them.
Free links last 7 days with a free account. On a paid plan every page you create stays online permanently.
See pricing