A friend of mine suggested I try hosting with www.nearlyfreespeech.net — because instead of a set monthly rate, they charge you based on usage. Low traffic sites (like mine) would cost very little to maintain. About that time, I was starting a private website, so I gave it a go. As it turns out, I’m quite happy.
Don’t get me wrong, about the same time I signed up, Nearly Free Speech had some MAJOR routing and DNS issues. My site was offline or horribly slow for over a week. Then, they had a major MySQL crash, and my site was offline for another half a day. Since that time, several months ago, it’s been great. I’m OK with a company having problems as long as they fix it, and communicate the problem with their clients. NFS did both.
Plus, they’re DIRT CHEAP!!! I started the account with about $10 in the “bank”, and only today did I feel a need to add more money. Not because it was low, but because I am adding another website to the account and I want to make sure it’s “spike proof”. See, if a website gets Dugg or Slashdotted, their servers happily scale for you — but you pay for the bandwidth such a spike generates. It seems very fair to me.
So if you’ve been looking for a really inexpensive way to reliably host a website, especially if it doesn’t get much traffic or store much data — Nearly Free Speech might be a good choice. I’m happy with it. When my hosting package is done here at GoDaddy, I’ll be switching this site over too.
I’m going to have to check them out for my next website project. I don’t mind godaddy unless I have to try and use their site.
I usually get mad at how terrible navigation on their site it.
My big issue with GoDaddy is that the one time I got “Dugg”, my site crumbled in about 3 seconds. I know the hosting is inexpensive, but occasional spikes should be something they can handle.
I’ve never gotten Dugg or Slashdotted on NFS, but they specifically claim to handle spikes like that.
If this is anything I might be interested in, ie have a use for, or need for please translate. If not I will go on in blisful ignorance. Thank you for being my personal computer geek.
I saw you got this cross-posted to LinuxJournal today and it made me think of some questions not really covered by their FAQ. And I’d much rather pester somebody I vaguely kind of know vs a total stranger. *grin* Any idea what version of Python they’re using on their servers (and if Python is available via mod_python)?
Mark: NFSN is using python 2.5.2 and 2.4.4 (you can see their CGI versions here: http://example.nfshost.com/versions.php), However, mod_python has not been implemented due to security concerns. They are looking at implementing it in the future as soon as security and stability in a shared environment is a non-issue.
Aaron,
Thanks a ton. I didn’t know the answer, and wasn’t sure where to look. š
Thanks for the info Aaron (and Shawn :)). I might just have to give them a try then.
Thanks a lot for your nice concept about nearly free speech. I might just have to give them a try then.