From Mshiltonj wiki

This web site is now hosted (as of July 2005) by NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I am very pleased with their service.

I switched to them for a number of reasons:

Their philosophy

They discuss their philosophy on their about page.

They quote the Bill of Rights and they are not BS-ing: "If you have something to say... if you want to print your own press... if you want to create a place where people who share your interests can peaceably assemble... then welcome to the one place where you can still get Free Speech. Nearly."

Their terms of service expressly note that their customers may publish offensive content: "NearlyFreeSpeech.NET does not control Content posted by its members and makes no guarantee as to its accuracy, intellectual property status, origin, quality, or validity. You acknowledge that by using Services, you may be exposed to Content that you find offensive, indecent, or objectionable, and that restricting your access to such content is your sole responsibility." They have a complete hands-off model, and don't want to nanny their customers or web surfers.

It's no secret that I'm a Libertarian, and iconoclastic, so I like patronizing the company on philosophical terms alone.

Their cost

It's cheap, man. What else can I say? I had an initial account with them setup for about six months before I finally moved my site over. Six months, and I only paid 5 dollars. And I still had money left over. It was like a try it before you buy kind of deal. No problems. No hassles.

Their business model

Every thing is self serve, and everything is a la carte. Everything is metered. I can do just about anything I want, but I only pay for the stuff I do. This is a personal site, which means small and low-traffic. That's also means it's practically free for me, costing on the order of pennies a day. And if my site ever gets popular (ha, ha), their model is still extremely attractive and reasonable.

I get my own instance of mysql and can have as many databases as I want, and I've got four. There are no subscriptions, no annual contracts or any of that crap.

The only issue I have is that they don't offer a cron service. But then, neither did my previous provider. And at least it's on their todo list. If they had cron, they'd be near perfect.

Their service

Everything has been great so far. After making the switch, my web site is chugging along much faster than with my previous provider -- and that's even after switching from mostly flat-files to an all dynamic wiki! They note that their service can even survive a slashdotting (although I doubt an all-dynamic site like mine could -- few can.)

Recommended

I definitely recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.net as a hosting provider.