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?…

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.

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.)…

New payment features, methods, and options

We’ve added a number of new payment features and options to our site designed to make things better for our members. This includes a new deposit form that allows arbitrary deposit amounts, the ability to choose either a specific payment or a specific deposit amount and let our system work out the fees, support for Dwolla and Bitcoin as payment methods, and the option to set up your site to accept contributions from the general public toward its hosting costs.
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Upcoming updates, upgrades, and maintenance

We have accumulated some housekeeping tasks that we’ll be taking care of over the next couple of months. They’re all necessary things to make sure our service keeps running at its best, and though we work hard to prevent these types of things from impacting services, occasionally they do intrude. As a result, we want to let everyone know what we’re up to and what the effects will be.
Continue reading Upcoming updates, upgrades, and maintenance…

Domain registration updates

We have a few small updates to announce with respect to domain registration. There will be some small price changes, both up and down. We are also adding support for registering some of the new competitive gTLD’s. Finally, for those who choose our RespectMyPrivacy service, it will now be automatically prepaid (including the 10% prepayment discount) during all registrations and renewals.
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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%.
Continue reading More power, more control, more insight, less cost….

Improving support and how we talk about it

Looking back, it’s hard to believe we’ve been using our new subscription-based support system for almost eight months. Wow, time flies. Overall, we’ve been very happy with this change. We really enjoy getting to spend time working with our members and helping them be successful with our service. The response from the people who’ve used it has also been almost uniformly very positive. So, right now, we feel like we finally got it right. Which isn’t to say that we can’t do even better.
Continue reading Improving support and how we talk about it…

Automatic file server upgrades

As most of our members are aware, one of our older file servers, f5, has been causing intermittent problems. The time has come to move the sites still using it to newer, faster, more reliable equipment. The ability to do that manually has been available in our UI for about a week now, and it has not surprisingly been pretty popular. But after that server caused additional downtime this past week, we’re moving to the next phase: moving sites automatically.
Continue reading Automatic file server upgrades…