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…

Small member interface upgrades

We have a few small member interface upgrades to announce.
Continue reading Small member interface upgrades…

PHP 4: Still standing in the doorway, telling everyone it’s leaving

On January 1st of this year, developer support for PHP 4 ended; only PHP 5 is supported these days.

Our system still works with PHP 4, and we still have about 32.5% of our active hosted sites running on PHP 4. But its days are clearly numbered, so we’re taking appropriate, measured steps to curtail PHP 4 support on our network as well. We’ve removed most public references to PHP 4, and using our interface it’s no longer possible to switch a site to PHP 4, only away from it. With that done, we’re not making specific plans to go out and yank PHP 4 out from under our members whose sites are still using it before they are ready.
Continue reading PHP 4: Still standing in the doorway, telling everyone it’s leaving…

Small change to URL processing

As many of our members know, our network uses edge technology (reverse proxies) to deliver static content at high speeds.

One thing we have always done is ensured that URLs that contain ? or .php or .cgi could not be processed by the reverse proxies. In order to provide more robust support for very active PHP-driven sites that need to integrate with caching functionality, we have elected to stop doing this. By default, the output of PHP and CGI scripts will still not be considered cache-eligible, but you now have the option to override this using an Expires: or Cache-Control: header if you want.
Continue reading Small change to URL processing…

CGI/ssh Upgrade

This is just a short note to reflect a couple of upgrades.

First, we have upgraded the ssh environment to more powerful hardware in order to allow for continued growth and to make sure scheduled tasks (still coming soon) will have enough resources to run without driving anybody’s site into the ground.

Second, we have updated Perl in the CGI/ssh environment from 5.8.8 to 5.8.9. Despite being a minor-version upgrade, this required the rebuild of nearly 1,000 CPAN modules and dozens of supporting libraries. Thus, we wanted to let people know to be on the lookout for resulting weirdness or incompatibilities. A few CPAN modules bought the farm on this upgrade, and we’ll list those below.
Continue reading CGI/ssh Upgrade…

Email forwarding follow-up

Our email forwarding upgrade has been completed! In general, it went very smoothly, with (of course) a couple of exceptions. The disruption was minimal, significantly less than expected; we were able to do a live migration of our UI to use the new backend without having to take it offline at all, and nobody was unable to manage their email forwarding for more than a few minutes. The new servers are running very well and the email processing scheme we have implemented seems to be working out.
Continue reading Email forwarding follow-up…

Email forwarding changes and UI downtime

Over the next few days, we will be making major changes to our email forwarding service in order to make sure that we are providing a consistent, high-quality forwarding service that meets our members’ expectations. This is something we have wanted to do for awhile, but recent events have forced us to pursue a change strategy that might not have been our first choice.
Continue reading Email forwarding changes and UI downtime…

Friday night maintenance window for MySQL

As previously announced, we are proceeding with a maintenance window on Friday night between 10pm and 1am Arizona/Pacific time (1am and 4am Eastern, 5am and 8am UTC).

The primary purpose of this maintenance window will be to add RAM and CPU power to some of our MySQL servers. Just under 40% of member MySQL processes will be affected, and we estimate the total time affected will be about 30 – 45 minutes.
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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.
Continue reading MySQL FreeBSD 7 ZFS Beta update & MySQL upgrades…

UPDATED: Domain registration price increases September 30th

It’s that time of year again. The leaves start to turn. The nights get a little cooler. And the domain registry operators gratuitously raise their prices, because ICANN apparently sent Homer Simpson to negotiate their contracts. We received notice of the specific effects on us today.

Effective September 30th, 2008, our prices for domain registrations, transfers, and renewals in our supported TLDs (com, net, org, biz, info & name) will increase from $7.99 to $8.59 per domain per year.
Continue reading UPDATED: Domain registration price increases September 30th…