Welcome to the forum.
You mentioned having a VP2 with a WeatherLink logger. But which one? WeatherLink Live or USB or Serial?
I would say there are
Five Six categories of online weather websites. Each type serves a good purpose and has a different ways of sustaining itself. Maybe I've missed a type though. EDIT: yes thank you PaulMy as I forgot GLOBE for education. Most benefit as you can see depends on many factors.
Free public online servicesThese usually sustain themselves by allowing station owners to upload data for free but they sell the data to companies. These online services then allow the public to view the station data just on their website. But in order to pull data that is where payment is required by companies using the data in their own software. The most popular online service in this category is Weather Underground. Probably because they have been around the longest and it becam the defacto online service for station manufacturers to send the data to. Therefore in this regard Weather Underground is the most useful to the general public because of several reasons; it is in many ways the online supported online service with some hardware (unless they invest in expansion), and it is the most visible from a viral word of mouth, therefore people without a station are likely to use it. Weather Underground is likely to have a station near just about anyone even if you are out in the middle of nowhere. Others that are less popular in this category could be popular by country. For example MetOffice WOW is very popular in the UK. Then there is AWEKAS that is popular in Austria and Germany. But these also enjoy worldwide use, just not as prevalent. Then some are just decent but not as popular probably because many manufacturers do not include the ability to upload to them like PWSweather. Therefore to answer which is most useful is difficult even in this category because you need to define most useful to whom and where are you located and what type of user are you?
- Weather Underground
- PWSweather
- AWEKAS
- WeatherCloud
- Windy
- WindGuru
- OpenWeatherMap
- MeteoMap.cloud
- and more
Station Manufacturers These are online services that are reserved for use by the customers of each brand. There is no monetization of the data. The service is an extention of the product purchased. You can look at this as software online rather than the need to install software locally. These days people expect to see their data remotely and on mobile devices. Manufacturers have moved from offering traditional computer software to view weather data to just putting it all online. If you aren't a customer then you can't upload to these services. But often in some cases they allow the public to view a station if the owner makes their station public with these services.
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Davis: Weatherlink.com
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Ambient Weather: Ambientweather.net
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Ecowitt and other Fine Offset clone manufactures (except Ambient): Ecowitt.net
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Acurite: myAcurite.com
Personal WebsitesThese are websites the individual station owner set up. They bare the expense themselves. This is often done as a way to customize and in many ways augment the quality of the information beyond what the typical free online services offer. The website could be designed from scratch, or often they use templates and then modify and personalize those. Some of these templates are:
- Saratoga
- Meteotemplate
- Leuven
- Belchertown
- Weather34
- PWS
- and more
CWOP / MADIS Uploading to CWOP is free. Once you upload to CWOP your data is picked up by a ton of places. Your data is processed by MADIS and then further available to many places. Including NWS NOAA and universities and even corporations. This helps in forecasting. The public can have the data via many access methods. I've put together a resource of places discovered where you can see your CWOP station data. I'm sure this list is not complete. But if I or someone else discovers another use then they are free to add it.
https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=35089.0Agricultural Use I wasn't sure if to place this in a category by itself or not. It loosely fits somewhat like the free online services. But these sites tend to not be for the general public but rather they have been designed for use in agriculture. You are often free to upload to these sites and see your data and even the data of other stations. But these websites have displays geared to agriculture companies for their crops because of how the data is presented and the tools provided assisting in the decision making process of the companies that use these services. These are often restricted in use to only offer basic level data unless you pay to unlock more features.
- MeteoagroNet
- Caubre
- and more
EDIT:
GLOBEThank you PaulMy in post below for reminding me of The GLOBE Program. This is an educational project with many participating countries. More info at link below.
https://www.globe.gov/