NearlyFreeSpeech – too good to be true?

by redshift

I wouldn’t normally post things like this, but I ran into a web hosting company called Nearly Free Speech today. It’s the cheapest hosting company I’ve ever seen, and it seems like they’re pretty reliable and feature-filled. It’s only one cent per month per megabyte of storage and one dollar per gigabyte of transfer. Note, that’s not per month, it’s per gigabyte – you put money into a “bandwidth account” and it’s only transferred into their account as you use it.

The benefits:

  1. Unbelievably cheap.
  2. Truly pay-as-you-go. You could send them a buck and be good for years, if you don’t use much bandwidth.
  3. Privacy – they don’t close sites or give out information for any reason except a court order.
  4. Features – CGI, perl, python, PHP, MySQL databases with admin access and phpMyAdmin, .htaccess, full email forwarding, the works, with DNS and domain registration available.
  5. Reliability – I can’t vouch for this, but they seem to use a good colocation facility and redundant systems, with only one failure (due to massive electrical outage) that I know of.

The downsides that I can see:

  1. No email accounts, only forwarding. This isn’t a problem for many people, you can get it elsewhere.
  2. Do-it-yourself – they don’t hold your hand, they just give you access. (On that note, you get FTP, sftp, scp, and ssh access) Therefore, little to no support aside from the basics.

I’d love to hear from some of their users as to their overall quality. I love the cheap pay-as-you-go style, especially with the features they have. If they offered email accounts I’d be all over it.