All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Nearlyfreespeech.net discounts large bandwidth usage

jdavidb on 2008-02-04T15:55:54

I've mentioned before my preferred hosting provider is , which by your usage, allowing small traffic websites to exist for basically less than a dollar a year. Now NFS has introduced a plan for higher-usage websites: previously, usage was $1 per Gigabyte of bandwidth used. This is still true for your first gigabyte. However, starting immediately upon completion of one gigabyte, the price starts going down logarithmically. A reloadable page displays in real time your changing bytes-per-penny pricing.

For almost all of my purposes, NFS has been suitable. I could pay a lot more for certain things, but I haven't found it to be worth it at this point in time. I'd rather continue to run my websites for the price of rifling through my couch cushions for spare change.

Slashdotted?

stu42j on 2008-02-04T18:43:11

Do you ever worry about getting slashdotted (dugg, etc) and ending up with a huge bandwidth bill?

Re:Slashdotted?

jdavidb on 2008-02-04T19:37:19

No. I worry a little bit about getting slashdotted and hacked. Or vandalized. But mainly, I don't worry about getting slashdotted, because I'm not producing anything of that kind of interest. :)

This whole journal entry was about the fact that becoming a large bandwidth consumer at nearlyfreespeech.net is now less of an issue than ever, because it'll cost less today than it did yesterday.

But for the record, with NFS you have a certain amount of money deposited, and that's it. If a sudden surge of traffic eats up your deposit, your site shuts down, and you'll have to talk to somebody to reactivate it. You can never get a huge bandwidth bill, because you'll never get a bill. You pay ahead of time.

By the way, you'll never believe this, but your question is in the FAQ. :) Under "What happens if I get slashdotted?":

A "major slashdotting" of a site hosted on our service will cost you (on average) about $10, one time.

There's also Why do you want money up front? and What happens if my account runs completely out of funds?.

I imagine that http://www.bugmenot.com/ runs quite a bandwidth bill every month, but they are still a prominent NFS.net customer. NFS is not a trap to make money by tricking people into paying a lot more than they expected.

NFS

sigzero on 2008-02-05T01:46:11

I have used NFS for a couple of sites that I get paid to maintain. They have always been great and have installed or updated any modules I have asked them for. I wish they did FastCGI though or maybe they do and I haven't looked.

Re:NFS

jdavidb on 2008-02-05T20:38:11

I think they do FastCGI, but I know zilch about it so I'm not sure. I know they don't do mod_perl.

Re:NFS

sigzero on 2008-02-06T01:33:53

From what I can tell you have to fork out some money at hosting providers to do mod_perl.

From the site:

FastCGI / SCGI (this is not applicable in our hosting environment, thus we do not offer it and programs written specifically to depend on its API will not work)

Re:NFS

jdavidb on 2008-02-06T20:44:09

Does FastCGI basically start up a daemon process or something that keeps running in the background for new requests? Because I know they specifically don't allow server processes, daemon processes, or even just long-running processes, so that might be the issue.