I used to use A Small Orange to host all of my odd web related things such as this blog, some of my labs stuff and parking for failed and abandoned projects. Once I started to move my blog and labs over to the Google App Engine, it seemed like a good idea to find somewhere cheaper that I could dump some age old PHP stuff on and serve redirects for my old and moved resources.
I still would highly recommend ASO to anyone looking for a really good shared host, I just wasn't hitting anywhere near my quotas for anything and couldn't see sense in sticking around.
I'm a user of Tweetie for my iPod Touch, and while exploring the app's site noticed a "hosted by nearlyfreespeech.net" link in the footer of the atebits homepage. I wouldn't expect a (non referral) link back to a host on a personal site, let alone a software vendor's homepage, so I decided to check NearlyFreeSpeech.NET out.
The NFSN homepage oddly caught my attention - it's extremely minimalistic, clearly not something designed to hook in customers using pretty graphics or stock art - it serves a functional purpose; to tell users what they provide and a vague idea of how much it will cost.
Once you delve into the services page, you find a very affordable set of services available in a pay-for-what-you-use format, meaning that very small sites can be hosted for close to nothing per month. On the flip side, it has to be noted that large sites will cost a lot of money to host, although some items such as bandwidth reduce in cost with the more you use.
One thing that struck me as interesting about Nearly Free Speech hosting is that their infrastructure is load balanced; sites will continue to work even if they are being hammered with visitors. From what I can see, their infrastructure starts with file servers, then a layer of servers to execute the code stored on the file servers and a squid cache layer. Each time a site is accessed a different server serves up the request, and NFSN also use DNS load balancing using a round-robin configuration of 3 IP addresses for each site. It's a pretty stable setup, and it doesn't hinge on the stability of a single shared server to keep a site running.
I used my DNS hosting at Linode as it was easy to just add in the server IPs and CNAMEs, but I'm currently considering using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET's RespectMyPrivacy service for my domains, which would probably mean transferring in my domains and switching to NFSN as a DNS provider.
The FAQ section is a pretty exhaustive rundown of general issues people have or might have with the service along with explanations and reasoning behind why parts of the service are the way they are.
I am currently hosting my old Last.fm generated stuff on NFSN, along with my Mint installations for labs and my blog, and my old LabsSource stuff that I can't bring myself to put on GitHub because of the lack of active development.
All of the above costs me 9¢ per day: about 40mb of bandwidth (4¢ / day), two dynamic sites (2¢ / day) my own MySQL process (2¢ / day) and about 5mb of stored data (1¢ / day). Pretty damn good.
