I love NearlyFreeSpeech and they were my first and current web host, although now I primarily use others. They are so incredibly cheap for those who want to host a simple site, and they come with a slew of interesting options like interesting pricing schemes. I hope they never go out of business.
Previously I thought of NFSN as a place to host a low-traffic static site for $1/year, or host an unmanaged WordPress site for $1/month. It sounds like it can now run web frameworks like Rails or Node.JS, as well as internal services like Redis.<p>I'm not sure where they fit in a world with free Google App Engine tiers and $5/mo VPSes. But they've been around a while, doing their thing, so that must be worth something to folks that are leery of the big guys and weary of being victims of acquisitions and product re-imaginings.
I get that they're incredibly low cost, but their MySQL support (MariaDB <i>5.3</i> with InnoDB disabled by default) seems not that great to me. Also, they say that their optional InnoDB support uses "MariaDB's advanced high-performance XtraDB implementation" -- XtraDB is made by Percona, not MariaDB.
This is great.<p>I love NFSN - I've hosted a lot there. It's brilliant for sticking up something simple, and they've weathered a number HN frontpages / stuff going viral on Twitter / etc, etc without any problem.
If you ever lose both your login & access to the email address from which you signed up, you will lose everything you host with nearlyfreespeech.<p>I was trying to help a friend recover his own site after the pre-paid credit expired. A mutual journo friend had set it up years earlier but lost access to an old email address. It was down because the pre-paid credit had expired, but wouldn't even take payment from someone they didn't know to get it back up.<p>Support wouldn't empathise or even help "in principle", i.e. "Given that we've lost access to the original email address that our friend signed up with, how can we go about recovering this account, give you some money saving the domain"? The answer was essentially: we don't care, you're dead to us.<p>I run an ISP in the UK that takes backup contact options, so I was trying to go through what options they _might_ have to help, but they weren't interested.<p>Cheap is good, especially when you're setting up sites for friends, but always think twice about the support you might need years down the line.