Offsite Network Status Page

We know that when there is a problem with our services, one of the most important things for us to do is communicate effectively with you about what the problem is and when we expect it to be fixed. Nothing sucks more than being left in the dark.

Ordinarily, we use System Problem Reports on the Support panel in our member interface to let you know about problems with the service. In most cases, this works well.

However, certain categories of outages, like upstream network failures, can render us unable to post such reports, or leave you unable to read them until after the problem is resolved. While such events should be rare, that’s the most important time for us to be letting you know what’s going on.

To that end, we’ve created an offsite network status page at http://status.nearlyfreespeech.net/. This site runs on one of our servers located in Dallas. That server doesn’t depend on our Phoenix hosting cluster at all, and will continue to operate even if everything else is offline.
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Writing files in PHP

The “traditional” web server just reads and sends out files in response to incoming requests. Consequently, the standard security configuration is therefore set up to give web accesses the bare minimum in terms of file permissions: the ability to read the site’s files, but not to change them.

But many PHP applications want to write files as well: forums that support uploading files, CMS applications, and many Wikis all create or update files as a normal part of their operation. Since the default permissions don’t allow it, many people run into trouble when trying to develop or install PHP applications that need this ability. This blog post will attempt to show how to do this on our system in a way that is easy to set up and very secure.
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Revising member support to better support our members.

Here are some eye-opening support statistics:

• About 25% of our members have ever interacted with our support system.
• About 14% of our members have opened more than one support issue.
• Over 50% of our support issues come from under 5% of our members.
• Providing support is our single largest recurring monthly cost line item. That means it costs us more than we pay for bandwidth.
• The cost of providing support is growing at a faster rate than any other cost.

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Where do we go from here?

We need your help! We have some great ideas about how to make our service better. In fact, we have a lot of great ideas about how to make our service better. On top of that, our members often give us even more great ideas!
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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.
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MySQL pricing changes effective 1/1/2007

Since we started, we have never imposed a charge for MySQL processes, choosing instead to fund MySQL out of the general hardware fund provided by the storage charge.

However, as time goes on, MySQL is becoming more of an issue. Not only is each successive release more demanding in terms of CPU and memory, but as time goes by, the things our members are doing with MySQL become more intensive as well.
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AWstats bugfix and domain UI improvements

We’ve fixed a long-standing bug with our nfsn-awstats script that caused it to ignore your access_log.old file if you didn’t check your statistics at least once per update cycle, and occasionally even if you did.
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Forwarding sites & URL rewriting

Note: the content of this blog entry is deprecated. Please search our member FAQ for “canonical” for more information about replacement techniques.

We recently got a support inquiry about alternate methods of forwarding visitors from one URL to another.

We have a FAQ entry about using “decoy” sites to forward alternate URLs. This is one method, and probably the easiest, but there are many others that can be useful in different circumstances.

What I’d like to do here is talk about the reasons why we recommend this one and discuss some of the alternatives and when they might be more useful.
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We’ve changed our blog URI

To make it easier to use RSS feeds, which apparently do not travel well via SSL URIs in some cases, we’ve moved the blog to a better location.

It’s now blog.nearlyfreespeech.net. If you subscribed to any RSS feeds, be sure to grab the new addresses for them. (Note that the new addresses are not SSL-enabled, so be sure they say “http://” instead of “https://”.)

CGI/ssh upgrade coming on 11/22

Since we have completed the underlying operating system upgrade in our hosting cluster, we are now in a position to upgrade our aging CGI/ssh environment. The current environment was based on FreeBSD 4, and the new environment will be based on the “latest and greatest” FreeBSD 6. This should have no long-term impact on most members, but if you have compiled your own binaries, they may need to be recompiled once this update is complete.
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