Not just for today: cheaper (and better) web hosting
I know I just posted about Dreamhost’s deal yesterday, but today I’m going to post about a completely different kind of web host, and the permanent deal they offer you.
NearlyFreeSpeech.net is a very unusual host. To start with, they don’t offer any hosting “plans”. They do something that’s almost unheard of instead: they charge you for what you actually use. Specifically, they charge a penny per megabyte of storage you need each month (this covers the files you put on their system) and a dollar per gigabyte of traffic (the “traffic” is the amount of information your website sends over the Internet to reach your visitors—the more visitors you have, the more traffic).
Let’s do a little compare-and-contrast. Dreamhost offers a truly insane amount of storage space and included traffic. 99.9% of people will probably never use the full capabilities of this account.
For example, let’s look at my usage. I wanted to see how NearlyFreeSpeech would shake out for my actual sites, so I looked at my stats for storage and traffic over the last few months. Right now, I’m holding pretty steady at about 77 MB of storage each month. Since I’ve been a Dreamhost customer (around 7 months), I’ve used about 4.5 GB of traffic. I didn’t sign up for a really great deal with Dreamhost, but it’s not bad at $7.95/month. That’s about $56 over the time I’m looking at.
Now what would this cost me at NearlyFreeSpeech? Let’s look. 77 MB/month * $0.01 = $0.77/month. 4.5 GB (not measured per month, just total) * $1 = $4.50. My total for the last seven months would be $9.89.
Now beyond cost, there’s another upside. Because I’m paying for actual usage, it is definitely in the best interest of NearlyFreeSpeech (hereafter refered to as NFS) to keep my site up and running. All hosts try to keep sites up, obviously, but NFS has an extra motivator: if my site’s down, they stop earning money. If no one can visit my site, I don’t pay for traffic. NFS has every reason to try very hard to keep my site operating.
Similarly, if my site takes a long time to load, visitors won’t necessarily wait around. If they leave, again, I won’t be paying for traffic, and NFS won’t make money. So you can also bet that they care deeply about keeping equipment modernized and optimized, and will rapidly look into any issues that are hurting the performance of sites.
From a technical standpoint, I’ll also point out that NFS has a very sensible load-balancing setup designed to keep both slowness and outages to an absolute minimum.
Obviously, I think NFS has a lot of “pros”. There are a few “cons”, though.
First, they don’t seem like a “hand-holding” kind of company. They expect their setup to appeal to people who have some experience with web hosting, so while I hear that provide great tech support and a members forum, I would sincerely doubt that they have a lot of “touchy-feely” tutorials or techs. If you’re starting from scratch, and have never done the web thing before, and don’t have a web developer helping you, another host might be a better option.
Second, there are some technologies they don’t support. These are clearly stated in their Frequently Asked Questions and include (sorry for the geek-speak!) SSL, FastCGI, cron, and Ruby on Rails. If you want something outside of normal hosting, you should make sure you read the FAQ before signing up. (Actually, it’s a pretty entertaining read, regardless…)
Other than those two items, I see no downside. When my contract with Dreamhost runs out, I’ll be moving my sites to NFS.
I know this was a pretty nerdy post, so please, if you’re confused-but-curious, or have questions, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out!
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