Automatic TLS is now a thing

We are rolling out new automatic TLS infrastructure that does not require members to set up or maintain anything. This means that, for new sites, aliases will get TLS automatically within a few minutes after they are set up and working. This works transparently with all site types, including custom processes and proxies. It doesn’t cost anything, you don’t have to do anything to set it up, and you don’t have to do anything to renew it.
Continue reading Automatic TLS is now a thing…

Small Christmas upgrades

We’ve got a couple of small updates to announce today:

• One server type to rule them all?
• A forum facelift.

Continue reading Small Christmas upgrades…

Bigger, better, faster, more

I debated whether to write a humorous intro, but I’ve ultimately decided it’s more important to get succinct information out to everyone, so here’s the TLDR:
Over the next few weeks, we will migrate NearlyFreeSpeech.NET to all-new equipment and greatly upgraded network infrastructure.

• We’re replacing our Intel Xeon servers with brand-new AMD Epyc servers.
• All our existing file storage will be migrated from SATA SSDs to NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs.
• Most of our content will be served from New York City rather than Phoenix after the upgrade.
• Various things may be intermittently weird or slow for the next couple of weeks as we shift them around, but we’re working hard to minimize and avoid disruptions to hosted services.

Continue reading Bigger, better, faster, more…

Hey! What happened to 2023Q2?

You may have noticed that production sites with normal updates are being upgraded from 2022Q4 to 2023Q1, and non-production sites are being upgraded from 2023Q1 to 2023Q3. So what happened to 2023Q2?
Continue reading Hey! What happened to 2023Q2?…

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET turns 20 today

The NearlyFreeSpeech.NET domain was registered on January 18, 2002. We’re 20 years old today. Wow! So much has changed between then and now. And so much hasn’t.

Looking forward to the next 20!

Free Speech in 2021

So, a bunch of people suddenly discovered they care deeply about free speech immediately after a handful of racists faced even mild consequences for plotting a literal insurrection.

That does not reflect well on those people.

We’ve received quite a few emails (and signups) from them in the past week or so. They appear to believe that “free speech” means they can say whatever they want without repercussions. (It does not.) They expect us to agree with them about that. (We do not.) And they believe they’re entitled to our reassurance and, in some cases, assistance. (They are not.)
Continue reading Free Speech in 2021…

Maintenance for Christmas

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are the lowest-usage days of the year (both in terms of member activity and in terms of visits to member sites), so we are going to roll out some core system upgrades over the next 36 hours. These updates relate mostly to file servers.

Despite having no single point of failure from the hardware perspective, each site’s content is still backed by a single system image (necessary for coherency), so these updates may cause some temporary disruptions to affected sites. We will do our best to minimize that.

We do also plan to upgrade our core database servers. These are fully redundant, so we do not anticipate disruption, but the possibility does exist. We hope this upgrade will resolve an issue that mainly manifests as intermittent errors in our member interface early in the morning (UTC) on Sundays.

Act now: The latest effort to censor you (FOSTA) is here!

The US House of Representatives has just passed a bill called FOSTA (the “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act”). This bill is headed to the senate. It needs to be stopped.

This bill is, as the name implies, ostensibly intended to fight sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is awful, and should be fought. But a lot of sex trafficking experts think that this bill won’t have that effect. That it will actually make things much worse for sex workers. For example, those sex trafficking victims that are supposed to be protected may suddenly find it illegal to talk about their experiences. Whoops.

(Yes, that’s a Jezebel link. If they don’t match your politics, fair enough, try Reason. Pretty much nobody on any side thinks this is a good idea, except a handful of underinformed celebrities. This is not a right-left issue.)

That’s probably reason enough not to pass it, or at least to go back and take another look. But that’s not the end of the story.
Continue reading Act now: The latest effort to censor you (FOSTA) is here!…

Significant pricing updates are coming soon

I’ve started and stopped writing a bunch of posts over the past few weeks. Recent events have really crystallized some issues that we’ve been looking at for over a year. Those posts are largely ideological in nature, and they tend to ramble on at very great length.

This isn’t intended to be such a post.

This is a post to acknowledge that our service has a couple of serious issues that require more urgent attention.

1. The cost and threat of DDOS attacks is escalating so quickly that unless we act, they will drive us out of business.
2. It’s time for us to move toward ICANN accreditation.

Addressing these concerns will require some major shifts in our pricing model. To be completely honest and upfront, these changes will primarily affect those sites and members that are currently paying the least. After the changes, the prices at the low end will still be low, but not as low, and in some cases, lower-cost sites may have a different set of options than they have in the past.
Continue reading Significant pricing updates are coming soon…

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.
Continue reading Unlimited free bandwidth!* (*Some limitations apply.)…