Unlimited free bandwidth!* (*Some limitations apply.)

We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes developing the next-generation of our core hosting technology, and we’re ready to move it to public testing. It has some exciting new features:

• TLS enhancements
• HTTP/2 support
• Automatic gzip compression
• Major Access Control List (ACL) improvements
• Shared IP blacklist support
• Websockets support
• Wildcard alias support

To encourage people to help us test out the new stuff, we’re exempting participating HTTP requests from bandwidth charges for the duration of the test. You can opt-in to the test for a particular site by selecting the “Use Free Beta Bandwidth” action on the Site Information panel for that site in our member interface. That page has all the fine print about the test, which mostly cover two central points:

• Reminding people that it is a test and things might not work.
• Clarifying that although there is no fixed limit to the amount of bandwidth a site can use under this test, there is a “floating” limit: don’t cause problems.

This test (and the free bandwidth) will run through at least March 15th, 2016.
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More power, more control, more insight, less cost.

We’ve made some very big changes to the fundamental nature of our service. We now support persistent processes and delegating requests for your site to those processes using HTTP, SCGI, or FastCGI. We’ve added the ability to graph up to two weeks of your site’s resource usage. And we’ve slashed resource charges by almost 70%.
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IPv6, SSL, scheduled tasks, storage discounts & bulk bandwidth

We have quite a few feature announcements to bring you this holiday season. We’ve added support for several features, some of which have been requested for years like IPv6, SSL, and scheduled tasks (AKA cron jobs). We’ve also introduced new billing options that make our service pricing fairer and more scalable; these options will help a broad variety of our members save money.
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Pools: Arbitrary HTTP Servers, Resource Reservation and Scalability

We are pleased to announce that we are beginning the beta of our new “pools” service. Pools are a way to reserve memory and CPU power for one or more web sites. This approach makes it possible to discard many of the limitations traditionally associated with our service.
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MySQL FreeBSD 7 ZFS Beta update & MySQL upgrades

Some time ago, we announced a beta test of MySQL running on FreeBSD 7 using the experimental ZFS filesystem. We’ve now concluded that beta test, and I wanted to let you know the results.

Here’s the executive summary: FreeBSD 7 is, by and large, great for us and we will be aggressively deploying it throughout our network in the near future. ZFS is also great, but while it definitely has a future on our network someday, this is not that day.
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Experimental FreeBSD 7 + ZFS + MySQL technology trial

For most of our production servers, we run FreeBSD 6.3, which is a well-tested, stable, and excellent-performing release. However, the FreeBSD world moves on and FreeBSD 7.0 was released earlier this year. The primary benefit to the new version is supposed to be vastly improved performance, ranging from 350% to 1500% faster, under heavy workloads.

Hey, we have some heavy workloads…
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PHP Update: Five, finally: fast and flexible!

As many of our members know, we’ve been beta-testing PHP 5 for a really long time. The PHP 5 Beta is now over; PHP 5 has become the default for new sites created on our service.
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A lot faster for a lot less money? Who wants that?

We are now officially soliciting beta testers for our new high-capacity high-volume service for static content. It has just gone live and it is not just fast, it is insanely fast. We’re talking ludicrous speed here, people! An experimental download was just clocked at 43 megabytes per second, but real-world downloads will probably be constrained by the size of off-network pipes.
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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.
Continue reading API New Year!…