NFSN: Unique and Excellent

After a bad hosting experience (Netfirms: poor tech. support), i immersed myself in web hosting shopping here at webhostingreviews.com and other places, for an ethical, honest hosting company able to host a small family memorial site at low cost yet with acceptable service. Not liking nor really trusting the very many discount web hosts, i eventually ran across the existence of Nearly Free Speech.net (NFSN) and finally saw a compelling option.

Unique business model: no flat rates here: you pay for what you use... no more, no less. Measured service, fairly priced amazingly close to what appears to be the actual cost of providing the services. Reading through their Terms of Service (which all of you should do for any web host you are seriously considering and about to sign up with) it was clear that their values are in alignment with mine: all seemed reasonable and fair.

Important: NFSN is not for everyone. NFSN members are supposed to be as self-sufficient as possible, and if their support tells you what is wrong and you don't understand what they are saying, it is up to you to go research what the terminology means and do your level best to figure it out. You are not paying for, and you are not receiving, support from a dedicated support staff. You are receiving support directly from the experts who set up and run the company and its servers. They're polite and nice (in my experience) with everyone who meets them halfway and makes an honest effort towards self-help. They clearly state that, as much as they wish it were otherwise, they are unable and unwilling to teach anyone how to be a webmaster nor how to use web design and related tools.

For a small site like ours, i doubt there is better pricing: in a week or so under 2 months of hosting with NFSN, it has cost us $1.87 for *everything*, including one MySQL instance and me doing a lot of back-and-forth with updates and whatnot.

When i did have support questions, they were answered extremely rapidly (within 5 min., typically) and accurately on the NFSN web support forum, by both the NFSN community and NFSN employees/principals.

I have no complaints whatsoever about NFSN and find it highly refreshing to be working with a company focused on one function (website hosting) and doing it extremely well, and in a way no one else has discovered yet which works out much better for many of us.

I also recommend you read the 15 Oct. 2007 review here by Hristo Genov for further details. The only area where my findings are different is that since NFSN has implemented improvements in their pricing structure in the last month or so, apparently they are more price competitive for larger, high-traffic sites, of which apparently they have been hosting quite a few for many years now.

Biggest Pro: You pay for what you use... no more, no less
Biggest Con: Not for the inexperienced nor those craving deep support

NearlyFreeSpeech.net - Different Approach to Shared Hosting.

Let's talk about NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

It is hosting with unique pricing structure and unique control panel.

I like this control panel in cpanel/plesk dominated market.

In fact you can use them for an year for unlimited domains with lite content and traffic and still pay $2-3 for whole year, but if your site is with heavy content and traffic, it is not cheap to be with them.But if you have that amount of traffic - probably you can afford to pay little more, using some kind of advertising on your site.

I also like their statement, that if anyone who wants information about their customers, must first provide court order for that.That's why they are "Nearly Free Speech".

Some unique features are:

(In some cases they are solid pros and in other cases they are pure cons)

-You have to learn their control panel and you must read their FAQ very carefully to understand unique features provided.
-They have some security restrictions on PHP/Perl and some popular web scripts will not run with default settings, or will not run at all.
-For data base account you must pay extra, but it is still OK if you do not waste data base accounts for every little script.
-They do not provide dedicated IP addresses and this makes hard or impossible use of SSL certificates by shared hosting customers.
-They do not host email accounts on their servers, but you still can use their email forwarding or use third party email server with your domain.

I use them for one and half year and i have several cases of downtime, but i always expect something like that with low cost hosting service providers.

My experience with their support is positive at all and i like their practice for accepting suggestions from customers for new features and pool them for a vote among all other customers.

They have also members community forum with useful information.

They have flexible managed DNS service - you have access to most features regarding your domain names pointed to their name servers.

Control panel interface is lite and fast with minimum images.

I am recommending this hosting for experienced webmasters and they must have will to discover something different in web hosting market.

Biggest Pro: Unique price structure..
Biggest Con: There is no dedicated IP addresses.