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NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is a web hosting service that aims to make web hosting affordable and usable for everyone.[2] It charges according to bandwidth and storage usage; other services such as domain registration, MySQL, and email forwarding are available for additional fees, and DNS service is free. NFSN also offers a specialized domain contact management service to protect the privacy and anonymity of its users. Because of NFSN's "pay as you go" fee structure, sites costing less than $0.01 per month are possible.[3]
[edit] Notable features
- Pay as you go bandwidth and storage pricing. Although funds must be deposited in advance, fees are deducted from your account in penny increments as resources are used. Unused funds deposited are fully refundable at any time.
- No fixed price "use-it-or-lose-it" bandwidth or storage fees. No "over-the-quota" overage fees.
- SSH access for uploading and managing content, along with Secure FTP, FTP, and scp support.
- Unlimited number of sites per account and unlimited MySQL databases (extra $.01/day fee required for MySQL).
- Full server logs with automatic rotation and compression.
- Unique in the industry privacy policy. [4]
- 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.
[edit] Notable drawbacks
- No SSL-secured web sites, and no static IP addresses. This is a company policy in response to IP address shortages. 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)
- No colocation and no dedicated hosting. 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 is more complicated to restrict access by IP address as the returned IP is always that of the front-end server.
- No persistent processes are allowed, although triggering a script with a HTTP request from an external server is a suitable workaround for tasks such as scheduled backups.
[edit] References
- ^ NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Beliefs - 2002
- ^ NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Beliefs - 2005
- ^ Hosting cost statistics
- ^ NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Privacy Policy
[edit] External links
