Domain registration price increases

Verisign has pricing increases going into effect on July 1st. As a result of these pricing changes, our registrar partner has informed us of corresponding increases which we must, in turn, pass along.

Effective July 1st, the new price for domain registrations, renewals, and transfers will increase from $8.59/year to $8.99/year.

Get your domain renewals in now to avoid the increase.

These changes have nothing to do with us, are not under our control, and are of no benefit to us. They’re bad for us, and they’re bad for you. Unfortunately, the same (auto-renewing into perpetuity) contracts with ICANN that grant Verisign a monopoly over .COM, .NET, and .NAME domains (among others) enshrine Verisign’s right to unilaterally raise prices by 7% every year, and they never miss a chance to do so. Their 30% profit margin in 2009 will almost certainly increase after they finish unloading everything not domain-related onto Symantec. It’s not bad work if you can get it. (And live with yourself afterward.)

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.
Continue reading Pools: Arbitrary HTTP Servers, Resource Reservation and Scalability…

A RespectMyPrivacy discount, a few UI upgrades, and Twitter?

We’ve released a minor update to our member UI with a few new features, one of which is of particular note: a 10% discount on RespectMyPrivacy service is now available in exchange for prepayment.
Continue reading A RespectMyPrivacy discount, a few UI upgrades, and Twitter?…

File server “f1” replacement

Our venerable old file server “f1” had some problems last month that left us with some doubt as to the viability of its redundant power supplies over the long term. Since then, we’ve been planning and preparing to migrate all the sites it handles to other, newer file servers.

That’s all been prepped now, and what we’re going to do is automatically migrate everyone during the month of April. If you have affected sites, you can get a specific time for each site from our member interface, and the main sites page will star any site scheduled for an upgrade on your list of sites so you can see at a glance which sites are affected.
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Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20

We have some facilities maintenance scheduled for this Friday. As part of this maintenance, we will need to physically move a handful of critical file and database servers between racks in our Phoenix datacenter. Since that equipment forms the heart of our hosting service, we’ll need to shut almost everything down briefly, just long enough to move it.

The maintenance window will be from 10am to 4pm MST (5pm to 11pm UTC) on Friday, November 20th, 2009.
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A PHP Include Exploit Explained

We are having a fairly consistent problem with spammers auto-exploiting a very common type of scripting vulnerability that appears on our members’ sites. Unlike most vulnerabilities that stem from a faulty version of some app a lot of people use, this one crops up primarily on sites containing PHP code that people write themselves.

Cleaning up the resulting messes is getting a little tedious and so, even though this is hardly a new exploit, I wanted to write a little bit about what the vulnerability is, how it works, how spammers exploit it, and how to keep your site safe.
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Service & pricing changes finalized

Our recent announcement that we were preparing to make pricing changes provoked quite a bit of discussion that resulted in significant improvements to our plans. (Please see both links if you want more information about the rationale and justification for these changes; both have been discussed in exhaustive detail.)

Those plans have now been finalized, and we will begin phasing them in this month.
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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.
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Quick WordPress Performance Tip: Create a favicon

One of our members’ WordPress blogs got heavily FARKed a bit ago. Alarms went off, we thought the server was going to crash. That’s pretty unusual, of course, so we looked into it and found something really interesting: the blog’s performance problem was entirely caused by the lack of a favicon.ico file.
Continue reading Quick WordPress Performance Tip: Create a favicon…