Is NearlyFreeSpeech any good?

April 30, 2008 3:02 AM

What are your experiences with NearlyFreeSpeech.net?

I'm looking into getting some new hosting, and I've been attracted by NearlyFreeSpeech, based on a comment here on Ask, and this review. It's going to be for a Wordpress blog. I'm interested in finding out what the level of service is like.

Does anyone have any experience of this setup?

Also, I use the wp-db-backup plugin. It seems (to me, though I could well be wrong) that this plugin uses cron, which NFSN doesn't support. Does this mean that the plugin wont work automatically?

posted by Rabulah to computers & internet (10 comments total)

They've been absolutely fine for me, for domain registration and DNS. Haven't used them for hosting, as they don't support FastCGI. Their email forwarding is dreadful and should not be used under any circumstances (they require that smtp hosts have a reverse dns entry, and many don't, so you get bouncing emails from some senders).
posted by singingfish at 3:12 AM on April 30

I use NFS across 3 domains, and from what I've seen so far it's very good. Very economical and very simple to set things up, much more flexible than my previous hosts have been (which restricted the number of users or domains, or even subdomains).

According to their FAQ they recommend a service called WebCron, which accesses your site at a pre-set time, on schedule and triggers your script. I'm not familiar with the plug-in, but I wouldn't have thought it would use cron, since the vast majority of web hosts don't offer cron on virtual hosting plans (in my experience anyway).

The only issue I have with NFS is (and this might be because I'm in NZ, and they're in the USA) it's very slow, which is somewhat annoying. You might have a different experience though.
posted by chrisbucks at 3:14 AM on April 30

NFS hosts my site, and they've always done a good job.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:24 AM on April 30

NFS hosts my rather simple html web page, and it's basically free, which is a big draw ( I owe them... uh... $0.0029 for the bandwidth I've used over the last 9 months).

Hosting a MySQL process through them costs at extra $0.01 per day on top of the standard storage and bandwidth charges.

One problem I've had is that their help documentation is sometimes written a little above my head, but generally I can figure it out without emailing their technical support. In general, I haven't' had any need to use their tech support at all.
posted by muddgirl at 5:48 AM on April 30

I also use them and have nothing but good things to say. They are responsive to help queries and seem to be ethical on top of that. I had one minor issue with their spam filter for their email forwarding but have since found out that this is a problem with email forwarding in general rather than NFS.

They are great!
posted by merocet at 7:21 AM on April 30

I setup a Joomla installation with NFS and since they don't offer CPanel and there way of naming MYSQL servers is little different (not localhost) I had to go through their help guide.

But giving the cheap hosting charges I would say its great for a low bandwidth site.

Also earlier I had all my domain names with GoDaddy and after reading so many horror stories about loosing your domain names, I transfered all of them to NFS. I figured that I would be able to trust a small organization like that rather than a big greedy corporation.
posted by WizKid at 7:29 AM on April 30

My experience has been very positive. There is no catch.
posted by phrontist at 10:26 AM on April 30

NFS is super cheap if your site doesn't get too many hits. And their hosting has been top notch speed fast high connection bandwidth super information highway power SEO server optimization network neutrality

They're pretty good is all I'm saying. But you should know— they don't do RoR or Django very well.
posted by theiconoclast31 at 10:43 AM on April 30

It certainly seems that they're a good host. Best answers to everyone. :D
posted by Rabulah at 10:52 AM on April 30

Never had a problem with them, great support.
posted by ifranzen at 10:13 AM on June 16