RSS and news feed aggregation tools for collecting, organising, and reading content from multiple web sources in one place. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
A feed aggregator collects RSS and Atom feeds from sites you choose and shows you everything they published, in order, with nothing else mixed in. No recommendations, no promoted posts, no account that can be closed under you. Google Reader's shutdown in 2013 gutted the category, and the second wave of platform lockdowns, when Twitter and Reddit closed off their APIs, pushed a lot of people back to it. Self-hosted RSS reading is more popular now than at any point since 2013, which is not what most people expect to hear.
The paid alternatives are decent and worth naming. Inoreader's free tier covers 150 subscriptions and its Pro plan runs at €6.67 per month on annual billing (€8.99 monthly) for 2,500 subscriptions plus newsletter, social and monitoring feeds. Feedly, NewsBlur and Readwise Reader all sell variations on the same thing. What you buy with money is convenience, mobile polish and AI summarising; what you give up is control over the reading history and a subscription that renews forever.
FreshRSS is the application here, and it is the healthiest project in this batch by a distance. Version 1.29.1 shipped on 20 May 2026, releases arrive several times a year, and the 1.29 line added support for PHP 8.5. It speaks the Google Reader API, which means the mobile and desktop apps people already like (Reeder, NetNewsWire, FeedMe and dozens more) connect to your own server rather than to somebody else's.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
A marketing or PR team tracking two hundred client, competitor and trade-press sources needs everything in one place with tags and saved searches, and does not want the archive to disappear if a subscription lapses. Self-hosting also means no per-seat charge for the account manager who checks it twice a week.
Commercial readers usually cap history or age items out after a window, which is exactly wrong for anyone building a longitudinal picture of a market or a regulator. On your own install you set the retention policy, so you can keep five years of a specific feed and thirty days of the noisy ones.
Because FreshRSS implements the Google Reader API, apps like Reeder and NetNewsWire sync against your server the same way they would against a paid service. The reading experience is identical to the commercial products; the difference is that the sync endpoint is a subdomain you own.
FreshRSS is multi-user, so a research team of six shares one install with separate accounts and separate feeds. Six paid Pro subscriptions cost real money every year; one hosting account that also serves the company website costs the same whether one person uses it or ten.
While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader.
This is the sentence the whole self-hosting case rests on. A free service with a loyal following was withdrawn with fifteen weeks of notice, and the loyalty counted for nothing. The lesson is not that hosted readers are bad, it is that where you keep years of subscriptions and reading history should be a decision you control rather than a business case somebody else reviews.
A self-hosted feed aggregator hammers the network on every refresh and chews disk on every cached image. We make sure cron runs at least every fifteen minutes (every minute on heavier installs), tune PHP memory to 256MB so the parser does not exhaust on a feed with embedded images, and let the database grow without panicking because aggregator schemas are usually well-indexed. Outbound HTTP timeouts get bumped because some publisher feeds are genuinely slow.
Cron is the whole game. FreshRSS refreshes feeds by running app/actualize_script.php, and the project recommends triggering it about every twenty minutes because no individual feed is refreshed more often than that anyway. Without a cron entry your feeds only update when somebody opens the page, which makes the install feel broken in a way that is hard to diagnose. Our plans include unlimited cron jobs and the schedule is set from the My365i control panel, so this takes a minute.
The second thing to get right is the document root. FreshRSS keeps everything personal in ./data/ and expects only ./p/ to be exposed to the web. Point your domain or subdomain at the p directory. Unpacking the archive into your public folder does work, and leaves the data directory reachable from the internet.
Watch two other things. A large refresh across hundreds of feeds is a long-running PHP process, so if you subscribe to a lot, stagger the schedule rather than pulling everything at once. And articles accumulate: set a retention policy, and use the cli/purge.php tool added in 1.29 to apply it. Look elsewhere if you want AI summarising, newsletter-to-RSS inboxes and social monitoring feeds out of the box. Inoreader and Feedly sell those, and rebuilding them is not a weekend.
Common questions we hear from people running feed aggregators applications on 365i hosting.
Yes, in practice. FreshRSS updates feeds by running a script, and if nothing runs it on a schedule then your feeds only refresh when you load the page yourself. The project suggests triggering it roughly every twenty minutes, since it will not refresh any single feed more often than that regardless. Every one of our hosting plans includes unlimited cron jobs configured from the My365i control panel with a visual interface, so no command-line work is needed to set it up.
Yes, with most of them. FreshRSS implements the Google Reader API, which is what Reeder, NetNewsWire, FeedMe, Fluent Reader and a long list of other clients speak. You add your own server's address, username and an application password, and it syncs read state and starred items exactly as it would against a paid service. There is also a Fever API for older clients, though the project describes it as more limited and less safe, so use the Google Reader API where the app supports it.
RSS never died, it stopped being fashionable, and FreshRSS is one of the more active self-hosted projects going. Version 1.29.1 was released on 20 May 2026, with several releases a year and dozens of contributors on each one. Recent work has included support for PHP 8.5, webhook notifications and a command-line purge tool. If anything, interest has grown since the major social platforms restricted their APIs and people went looking for a reading source nobody else controls.
Set a retention policy and let it run. FreshRSS lets you configure how many articles to keep and how long to keep them, per feed as well as globally, and version 1.29 added a command-line purge tool you can put on a weekly cron to apply those rules. Without it an install that follows busy news sources will accumulate steadily. It is not usually a crisis on our plans, but it is worth deciding deliberately whether you want a rolling window or a permanent archive.
Yes, provided you point the web root at the right folder. FreshRSS separates the public directory from the data directory and expects only the public one to be reachable. If you unzip it into your public folder and leave everything exposed, your feed list, credentials file and reading history sit under a guessable URL. Set the site's document root to the application's public directory during setup. After that it is an ordinary PHP application, covered by the free wildcard SSL and daily backups on every plan.
Get Feed Aggregators apps up and running in minutes with our fast, reliable web hosting. Every plan includes one-click installation, free SSL, UK, US & Asia data centres, and dedicated expert support.
All prices exclude VAT. No contract, cancel any time.
All 1 feed aggregators applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
