NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Review

As promised here's my review of NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, my current web host.

Features

The feature list isn't anything special; their service is more designed for people who have a more detailed idea of what they are doing. The don't have anything fancy like cpanel, though they do have a nice easy to configure AWStats set up already, which is certainly nice. As a consequence to use their service you need to have a passing familiarity with the Unix command line; they use FreeBSD, but my knowledge of Linux has been more than sufficient. This requirement for command-line knowledge might be off-putting for some, but I'm one of those people who prefer the command line for most tasks. Otherwise it's just your typical Unix shared web host, with PHP, CGI, etc.

Performance

While I haven't done anything like rigorous performance testing, the performance seems acceptable for a light-weight, text-centric site like mine. If you where using a site with heavy multimedia though, you may encounter some problems.

Price

The price is exceptional. It's so far cost me five cents to host my site for the last five months. Their pricing scheme is complex, but basically you just pay based on the amount of data you have on their servers and the amount of data you transfer, so if your site is very big, in disk usage, or has very high traffic, it will start to cost more. My blog is a small, unfortunately not super popular, primarily text site, so it's very cheap for me.

Support

Support is fairly responsive; I've had to contact them twice so far with simple configuration requests, both of which they have replied to and resolved within six hours. I work for a SaaS company in customer support and I'm jealous of their support times.

Conclusions

Overall, I think NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is an excellent host, at an excellent price. Though perhaps not suited for some people who aren't as technically minded. The only problem I've encountered so far was my own fault, basically I migrated my comments script to the new host, running an entirely different OS, without first checking that it would work, so it was down for a while, before I got it fixed.

Categories: Computers, Reviews, Meta
Date: 2009-05-17 23:03:54, 14 years and 320 days ago

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