Service & pricing changes finalized

Our recent announcement that we were preparing to make pricing changes provoked quite a bit of discussion that resulted in significant improvements to our plans. (Please see both links if you want more information about the rationale and justification for these changes; both have been discussed in exhaustive detail.)

Those plans have now been finalized, and we will begin phasing them in this month.
Continue reading Service & pricing changes finalized…

Pricing changes incoming

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET was founded with no intention of ever turning a profit. There are no investors to pay off, no debt to service, and no short-term-focused shareholders measuring ROI with three-month horizons. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET exists because I want to provide as many people as possible with affordable hosting free of “big company” restrictions that come from pleasing investors, debtors, and shareholders. Therefore, all the fees we charge are designed to cover the costs of the resources it takes to provide the service.

One of the things we are running into with our pricing model is that the resource-based pricing we currently use doesn’t take everything into account, and doesn’t always do so accurately. That’s something we need to address.
Continue reading Pricing changes incoming…

Breaking through the bandwidth barrier

One of the things that we have always wanted to do is deliver bigger bandwidth discounts to our members. Our 1GB/$1 pricing is ideal for sites that don’t use much bandwidth. But we’re painfully aware that as the gigabytes pile up, the costs pile up proportionally.

What if they didn’t?
Continue reading Breaking through the bandwidth barrier…

Domain prices increasing October 12, renew now!

As you may be aware, most registries have announced they are increasing prices by the maximum their contracts with ICANN will allow. We’ve finally received information about when and how this change will affect us.

On October 12th, our pricing for all the top-level domains we support will increase from $7.50/year to $7.99/year for all domain registrations, renewals, and transfers. All other pricing, including RespectMyPrivacy.COM, will remain the same.
Continue reading Domain prices increasing October 12, renew now!…

Revising member support to better support our members.

Here are some eye-opening support statistics:

• About 25% of our members have ever interacted with our support system.
• About 14% of our members have opened more than one support issue.
• Over 50% of our support issues come from under 5% of our members.
• Providing support is our single largest recurring monthly cost line item. That means it costs us more than we pay for bandwidth.
• The cost of providing support is growing at a faster rate than any other cost.

Continue reading Revising member support to better support our members….

MySQL pricing changes effective 1/1/2007

Since we started, we have never imposed a charge for MySQL processes, choosing instead to fund MySQL out of the general hardware fund provided by the storage charge.

However, as time goes on, MySQL is becoming more of an issue. Not only is each successive release more demanding in terms of CPU and memory, but as time goes by, the things our members are doing with MySQL become more intensive as well.
Continue reading MySQL pricing changes effective 1/1/2007…

So many categories

So few posts. Until we’ve got posts in every category we’ve posted this one to all of them, so you can see what’s in store and subscribe to the feeds you want before you miss anything.

If this is the only post you see in a category, it just means the category hasn’t been assigned any real posts yet.