Nearlyfreespeech.net Web Hosting Review

I have been using in the past months nearlyfreespeech.net shared hosting services for some websites, including my personal blog, and I am quite satisfied of the service, so I am writing a review, though I understand this is not the kind of service the average reader is interested in.

Often most people choose their hosting packages based on huge bandwidth and space bundles they don't need anyway as their 3000 pageviews/day wordpress blogs won't need more than 7-8gb bandwidth each month. Doing that they share their server with a lot of abuser actually trying to exploit those huge disk and bandwidth bundles, and they tipically end up with a very poor and oversold service.

NearlyFreeSpeech is different as they charge only for what you use, which in my opinion is very good as long as you don't need more than 20-30gb bandwidth each month. Their prices are exactly matched to their expenses and cost structures, so if you do need more resources they earn more, if you have a 1gb/month website (like most blogs and small business websites anyway) you will end up paying a ridiculous amount like 15$ each year.

This way they cannot oversell, they can't threaten you with long term prepaid committments as their discounts works exactly in the opposite way (the more you keep your site with them, more bandwidth you use, cheaper is that bandwidth), and you are free to go away anytime without wasting a dime more than necessary.

Despite I run some dedicated servers, I use a shared hosting for my own personal blog as I don't like to mix business and personal stuff, so here I try to review their services :

- Datacenter is in Arizona, connectivity is good, never had any issue (and I live in Europe)

- They use a very custom clustered FreeBSD solution which is the ultimate geek heaven, clustered in this case really means clustered : i.e. that your website is at least on three different servers with a reverse proxy front-end (so it's better if you use their nameservers when moving your websites to them).

- You have full SSH access, where you can rsync data, use svn (it easens a lot software installation, especially keeping wordpress up to date), and do most stuff.

- You can select a PHP4 or PHP5 server, select log rotation interval, and what log you actually need (none, rewrite log, combined log, mysql slow queries log, and so on)

- You can park as many domain as you wish, and host their dns for free. So if you have ten low traffic websites most likely it will cost you less than pre-packaged hosters.

- You have YOUR OWN mysql process (with an internal hostname), on a different server, where you can do everything you like as it's completely isolated from other processes, so you can create how many mysql databases you wish, and so on.
Hhaving your server a unique hostname inside their environment (like your-account-name.db rather than 'localhost') allows them to manage in a better way the load on their sql servers I guess, because they can move mysql processes between servers without you even noticing.
I asked to have my sql process on a FreeBSD 7 + ZFS sql server and I have to say this is the best sql server I have ever experienced in a shared environment when it comes to speed.

- You have a custom control panel where you can host how many domains as you like, each domain has got his own account, and most likely is on a different server from your other domains, so it's quite impossible you get all your websites down at once (to be honest my websites has never been down in these months).

- They of course guarantee backups of your data, but if you like extra peace of mind against datacenter-wide outages (ie natural disasters) they offer an offsite rsync backup in partnership with rsync.net at a ridiculous price (some cents/gigabyte/month)

So these are the advantages I see.
Of course they have some drawbacks:

- They don't offer email hosting. You need to host your email wherever else (being them paid providers like fastmail.fm or free email providers like google apps for domains).
You can have a forwarding service, though, that will cost you some money for each domain.

- They are unbeatable on small websites, but if you use a LOT of bandwidth, you can find better deals. Over 30-40gb/month mark maybe a semidedicated from a reputable company may offer you a better power/price ratio. And of course if you host a lot of files, images, and the like, this is not the service for you.

- Service is pretty self catering, meaning I reccomend this only to geeks and experts anyway. If you are the kind of person enjoying the ability to choose your shell in the control panel amongst 10 alternatives (bash, zsh, tcsh, fish, bla bla) then this is the service for you.
If you are the kind of person you like cpanel because it allows you to restore your backups in a clic, for example: this is definitely NOT the hosting provider you may like. So hostgator and similar providers can safely sleep at night, ahahah.

- Rude support, see above. That's not a service for retards/newbies, they may answer your question just with a link on their wiki/documentation website.
If you are a slashdot commenter maybe you're going to like their attitude, and with this example I guess I made myself clear. This is one of the things, in my opinion, it won't allow them to grow over a certain userbase numbers, but maybe that's exactly what they want.

After all service is good, and is a service for people who don't need support anyway, so I sticked with them anyway.

The Fact they are in business since several years, they developed their custom infrastructure and their control panel, of course makes them better than the common unkown cpanel host in my eyes, anyway.