First experiences with NearlyFreeSpeech

I have been using NearlyFreeSpeech the Web hosting company where you pay only for what you use.

They have a pretty interesting business model, where you deposit your money with them, and the charge against that deposit for your use of bandwidth and storage, if you do not use their services, you will not be discounted at all.

They charge for maintenance of your site 1 cent per day per site, but that is only if you are hosting a dynamic site, if you are hosting a static site there are no fixed costs.

Traffic chargers goes from 1 dollar per Gigabyte, to 0.2 dollars per Gigabyte, the more you use, the less you pay per Gigabyte, you also have to pay for storage, where you pay 1 cent per Megabyte per month.

Features

I like that they offer ssh access for your account, of course being them a shared hosting provider, you only get access your home folder, where you have a public and a private folders.

You have access to Jekyll and some other ruby gems. You can create databases using their MySQL server, where you can create as many databases and as many users as you want, the cost is 2 cents per day per process for the first one, 3 cents per day for the second and the rest of additional MySQL processes.

Prices

If you have a Wordpress blog you want to host with them. Say your blog uses 50 Megabytes of storage and traffic a total of 4 Gigabytes per month. You will be charged between 3 and 3.50 dollars per month.

Now if you are hosting just a static site with them, with the same characteristics 50 Megabytes of storage and 4 Gigabytes per month of traffic, you will be charged only: 2 or 2.50 dollars per month.

Another you may have if you are just hosting a static site, is Amazon S3, where using the same example you may pay less than a dollar. But with NFSN you have Apache, and you have access to .htaccess in fact you have some more flexibility. And you can have mix of static and dynamic sites.

In fact, if you are planning to update your static site frequently, I think NFSN is a better option than S3, if you static site, is really static and you almost never update it, then S3 is surely a better option.

Conclusion

NFSN is a great place to host your site, being it dynamic or static, their pricing structure is a good advantage for small to medium traffic sites.

I think NearlyFreeSpeech Network is the best shared hosting service, and it comes to one of my favorite places to host my site.

If you want to know which are the others:

• Linode
• Site44
• Amazon S3
• NearlyFreeSpeec.Net

not specifically in that order, I just use one or the other based on what I need.