NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

URL	https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Web hosting service
Registration	Yes
Available language(s)	English
Owner	NFSN, Inc.
Launched	February 4, 2002
Alexa rank	153,641

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is a web hosting service that provides low-cost services for low-use websites. It is unique in that it offers SSH access to all its users, whereas most services charge a premium for this access.

Company name

NearlyFreeSpeech is meant as a double entendre intended to convey commitment to freedom of speech by hosting sites for a cost that can be as low as 2 cents, a pricing structure that is also intended as a play on words.

Pricing structure

Nearlyfreespeech.net has a "pay as you go" bandwidth and storage pricing structure based on a complex formula to calculate fees: the cost of Δb GB on an account where b₀ GB have already been consumed.

$\operatorname{nfscost}(b_0, \Delta b)=\sum_{x=b_0}^{b_0+\Delta b}\frac{1}{1 + \log x}$

Because of this pricing formula, Nearlyfreespeech.net's service is cost-effective for low-bandwidth sites and expensive for high-bandwidth sites. Bandwidth fees purportedly decrease as more bandwidth is consumed on an account, yet the service remains expensive for sites with high-bandwidth usage.

Nearlyfreespeech.net charges for other services such as domain registration, MySQL, email forwarding, DNS, domain contact management (to provide anonymity for users), support, and a fee of US$0.01 per day sites that use scripting.

Services and Features

• Variable bandwidth and storage fees: instead of buying "resource buckets", users pay for the resources their websites use. Fees are deducted from users' accounts in one-cent increments although funds are deposited in advance. Unused deposited funds are fully refundable at any time.
• SSH access for uploading and managing content, along with SFTP, FTP, and SCP support.
• Unlimited number of sites per account and unlimited MySQL databases (extra 0.02USD per day fee required for MySQL).
• Full server logs with automatic rotation and compression.
• Unique in the industry privacy policy.
• Sites are hosted on a cluster, as opposed to a single server. As a result, sites are not suspended for excess CPU usage resulting from increases in web traffic.
• No service contract time commitment is required or even available.

Criticisms

• Transport layer security and static IP addresses are not possible. This is due to a company policy in response to IPv4 address exhaustion. Although an IPv4 address can be shared by multiple sites, current web standards require a unique IP address for each HTTPS site. (Also see Virtual hosting)
• Colocation and dedicated hosting are not possible. All customer sites are run on a network of "distributed, fault tolerant, load balancing shared servers."
• Although .htaccess files are allowed and most standard functions work as expected, it can not be used to block IP addresses, so it must be done separately.
• Persistent processes are not allowed, although triggering a script with an HTTP request from an external server is a suitable workaround for tasks such as scheduled backups.
• Automatic HTTP compression is not supported. Workarounds include supplying static compressed versions and selecting based on .htaccess, or renaming HTML files to PHP and insert <?php ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?> at the top of each, potentially using .htaccess (php_value auto_prepend_file "yourheader.php").

External links

• NearlyFreeSpeech.NET
• Reviews on HostJury.com
• Review on HostingFu.com