Pay-As-You-Go Web Hosting
Posted by Jon Lee in Reviews, Web Development, tags: NearlyFreeSpeech, review, web development, web-hosting
I get e-mails and questions all the time from people wondering where they should host their blog. Let’s face it, as much as I recommend mediatemple as an excellent web host, it’s just not for everyone. Not everyone is willing to shell out $15 a month for a web host when they can’t use up all the resources offered and just need is simple no frills web host with reliable up time.
That’s exactly what NearlyFreeSpeech.net is. It was recommended to me by several fellow web developers and I think it is the best solution for small sites and businesses.
Pay As You Go
NearlyFreeSpeech’s business model is different from what you would expect from other web hosts. Instead of paying a monthly fee for a set amount of resources, you pay for only the resources that you use. If you get no visitors in a month, you don’t pay anything at all that month — no base fees or hidden costs.
The pricing is 1 cent for each megabyte of storage and $1 for each gigabyte of bandwidth used per month. For small-medium sized blogs this works out to less than a dollar a month for quality hosting! (Unless you get dugg of course).
Full Featured Hosting
Even with the (potentially) low price, you get a full featured web host which includes PHP, MySQL databases as well as SSH access. Keep in mind though, this is shared hosting. But realistically, at that cost, you can’t be expecting a dedicated server.
A Nice Change
NearlyFreeSpeech is a nice change from all the other web hosts out there that offer tremendous amounts of bandwidth and storage knowing full well most customers won’t even use 1% of it. It’s not just for small sites either, bigger sites like BugMeNot also host with them successfully though I’m not sure what their monthly bill is.
This isn’t a sponsored post or anything, in fact they don’t believe in affiliates or anything of that sort. They rely mainly on word of mouth advertising from satisfied customers and that’s exactly how I found out about it.
I personally wouldn’t use them though because my sites currently take up over 5GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth a month. That would cost me over $150 a month instead of the $15 a month I pay with mediatemple but for small, personal hosting this is the best solution I have seen yet.
If anyone has personal experience with them, I’d love to hear it!
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That sounds very risky. Being dugg or stumbled upon could really put someone into debt with this “pay as you go” program. I would just hate to be worried about my bandwidth usage everyday. Every morning nearlyfreespeech users will be frantically checking their bandwidth usage to make sure they haven’t gone over what they can afford. I’d rather live in peace and just pay godaddy.com the $3 .00 a month.
Nice web hosting package for new-comers where there is still not much traffic yet!
Well a Wordpress site getting dugg/reddit/slashdotted at the same time would probably still not exceed 1GB of transfer unless you have a lot of images or videos on your blog — the bigger hit is on the CPU resources which from what I hear, NearlyFreeSpeech is quite capable on handling (only anecdotal evidence though).
I recommend reading this post, especially the comments. Some pretty interesting stuff: http://nsharporg.wordpress.com/2007/08/15/congrats-you-are-on-digg-and-reddit-we-know-this-is-a-special-moment-for-you-and-as-your-web-host-for-the-past-8-years-we-are-going-to-help-you-celebrate-by-killing-your-site/
Or even for old-timers! Several big sites are hosted with them without too much trouble.
I am using NFS since a year now and it’s been great. My sites have lots of videos and images, but I use Amazon S3 to host those files, so I have like 2 MB of storage only at NFS.
~g
nice webhosting paket. looks very interessting
Thanks. I’m working on a new site that’s pretty much just text and this should work well with it.
Actually, this is an awesome concept, especially for someone who’s just getting started. Hitting the front page of Digg will probably cost you $10-15 with these guys. If you have a “regular” shared host, they’ll shut down your site (just like what happened in that link above from Jon). I know…it happened to one of my sites the first time I got Dugg. I would much rather pay extra when I get crazy traffic than have my site shut down and miss all of that traffic (not to mention piss off my regular visitors).
That’s actually a wonderful solution!!
Pay as you go strategy seem a good strategy to start online business in very low budget. but it could be more expensive when the business grow.
The other benefit that I think is this hosting will not trick the member about the price. Some web host sometimes offer very big space and bandwidth to compete with other hosts. Although they know for sure, member sometimes do not really using it.
Pay as you go webhosting is a priority for me. I’ve found alot of hosting companies that I wanted to try, but I didn’t want to commit to paying for an entire year or two when I hadn’t seen for myself how high quality their services were!
Great web hosting package man….nice job…
You can also go with freewebs.com.
The free plan just insert some publicity in your page.
But what’s cool is that you can design your website using their large selection of template. So building a website is just great.
[...] well for everyone. Not everyone can afford mediatemple’s high quality web hosting, and a pay-as-you-go hosting package is not the best choice for people expecting a lot of traffic. There is a very large middle ground [...]
i use and recommend nfs to host lots of small statics images/js/css/etc…
it can almost replace any good cdn for small contents.
and with little htaccess stuffs sets these statics with long future expires so they can be cached very long and wont eat up too much bandwidth.
imho,
s3 will be somewhat slow for serving lots of small icons/js/css/etc…
use s3 only to serve huge audio/video/pdf/etc…
with both these combined, you could probably beat any cdn in price and performance.
Very nice host. I’ve been an NFSN customer for most of the year, and I’ve been a happy camper with one exception.
Static IP addresses. They “don’t believe in them”. This really jacks up a lot of python scripts I write that need a point of contact, and I will never be able to run any games I write on Moola API.
If anybody knows of a good pay-as-you-go host that allows static IPs, I’m afraid I’ll have to switch.
Other than that, excelent host. 8 dollar domains, cheap hosting for those that use almost no bandwidth, and the customer service is fast and to the point. No canned answers.