
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET – The Best Minimalist Web Hosting Service? - exolymph
http://winningwp.com/nearlyfreespeech-web-hosting-review/
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newscracker
I've been using NFSN for quite sometime for a few lean sites. I would
recommend it to anyone who wants a site at a very low cost and has some
technical knowledge. If you're tech savvy, value freedom, privacy, etc., then
NFSN should be a service you should look at for cheap shared hosting.

My biggest cost is the domain name renewal by a huge margin. The cost of
storage, bandwidth and resource use amount to so tiny a figure that I always
think about the other shared hosts (which are usually oversold) where most
people pay a lot more than what they use. I also use the free tier of
CloudFlare in front of the NSFN sites, and that has made my site costs (minus
domain fees) negligible (like a few dollars a year - yes, a year). Of course,
my needs are small, but I believe this would work well for most people who
want a site that's not run by some other company selling ads on their content.

Since the costs are usually very low, it also has an amusing side effect where
members start counting pennies literally and try to optimize it further (I've
indulged in that too)!!!

The owner/admin, jdw, is a no-nonsense person who's quite helpful. Reading his
comments and views on the FAQ, in the feature voting system and on the forums
provides a lot of insight about NFSN and can also be a nice learning
experience on many topics - technical, freedom, policy, political and others.

There are three main downsides that I have noticed, which may make using NFSN
a bit more frustrating for some people:

1\. You have to have at least some technical knowledge if you want to install
anything for dynamic websites. Otherwise you'd struggle since there's nothing
like cPanel or any other interface that allows one-click installation of
popular web applications.

2\. There is a feature voting system where one can propose new additions and
have other members can vote and comment on. But you'd find many voted features
just sitting around for several years with no action on them, even those that
look quite simple. On its part, NFSN is quite clear in stating that these may
never be implemented and that it may take up only those that are cheaper and
easier to do and maintain. And there are many feature requests that have been
completed. But it's difficult to accept that some simple ones aren't done for
a very long time.

3\. Paid support could be a relatively bigger drain on your expenses if you do
need it. Again, NFSN does not believe in users cross-subsidizing each other
and tries its best to put actual costs (or close) on the user requiring
something. But this may come as a surprise for users.

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gtf21
I used to use NFSN for everything, but I found performance to be a bit painful
(and also moved away from hosting websites to hosting more complex systems). I
would still say that it's a great company with a great product ethos though. I
hosted all sorts of sites on there.

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exolymph
Just out of curiosity, what kind of performance issues did you have?

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dublinben
Probably the same performance issues you get with any shared hosting provider.
You're not paying for dedicated resources, so you shouldn't expect to get
dedicated performance.

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ravenstine
I was about to dismiss them for only supporting PHP, which I remember from
using them years ago. Turns out they now support Ruby and Node.js! And they
install MariaDB instead of Oracle MySQL. Pretty nice. I'll have to try them
out again sometime.

~~~
newscracker
The setup process for other platforms is a bit more involved though. It's not
as straightforward as PHP (which is just choosing an Apache site type) or
MariaDB/MySQL (which can be setup in a couple of clicks on the site).

There is a Django setup guide on the blog [1] that could be looked at for the
process to setup things like Rails, PostgreSQL and a few other things.

[1]: [https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2014/11/17/how-to-
django-o...](https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2014/11/17/how-to-django-on-
nearlyfreespeech-net/)

