Writing files in PHP

The “traditional” web server just reads and sends out files in response to incoming requests. Consequently, the standard security configuration is therefore set up to give web accesses the bare minimum in terms of file permissions: the ability to read the site’s files, but not to change them.

But many PHP applications want to write files as well: forums that support uploading files, CMS applications, and many Wikis all create or update files as a normal part of their operation. Since the default permissions don’t allow it, many people run into trouble when trying to develop or install PHP applications that need this ability. This blog post will attempt to show how to do this on our system in a way that is easy to set up and very secure.
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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.

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Where do we go from here?

We need your help! We have some great ideas about how to make our service better. In fact, we have a lot of great ideas about how to make our service better. On top of that, our members often give us even more great ideas!
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API New Year!

To help ring in the new year, we’ve been hard at work on a major new requested feature. (Well, several actually, but one at a time….)

We are pleased to announce that the NearlyFreeSpeech.NET API is about to enter beta. What is the NearlyFreespeech.NET API? In a nutshell, it’s a way to control your hosting services from a program or script.
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