This may be better suited for my technical blog – and speaking of irony, I was going to link to it, but silwenae.com isn’t responding. I registered paulcutler.org to test out Nearlyfreespeech.net, a webhosting company. I had first heard of Nearlyfreespeech when Bugmenot.com came under fire. Bugmenot is a website dedicated to providing logins to sites that require registration, so you can bypass giving your personal information to sites like Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or most newspaper websites. Nearlyfreespeech hosted them after Bugmenot was dumped by their current host.

Webhosting is an odd business. Prices have come down dramatically in the last few years, and most webhosts are just resellers rebranding others services, like ThePlanet. They offer control panels to make it easy for non-technical folks to get their websites up and manage their email. Nearlyfreespeech isn’t all that different, as their servers are colocated within one of those type of hosting centers, but they differ in a few areas. There are no monthly fees – you pay for the bandwidth you use over time, minus any credit card fees after you give them a deposit. There are no frills – it’s not for newbies. They actually give you more control over the sites you use, but you need to know what you’re doing.

Most webhosts will give you a set number of things: email accounts, how much bandwidth you can use, subdomains (xxxx.paulcutler.org with xxxx being a subdomain), how many databases you can have, how many other domains you can host on your site (for instance, with silwenae.com / pixehost as my webhost, I can have 5 more domains, as I have movietuesday.com and jholzer.com hosted there as well), etc. Nearlyfreespeech basically says do what you will, just pay for your traffic, with one exception. They don’t do email, just web hosting.

As I was talking to Fazin yesterday, who helped with a database import problem I was having, he pointed out the lack of email. This is a challenge, as silwenae at silwenae dot com has become my email address for everything over the last few years. I’m pretty interested in migrating from pixiehost to nearlyfreespeech, but now I have to research email options. When silwenae.net was up in it’s heyday running a linux distro called e-smith, e-smith had awesome email integration built in. But when I decided to run my own true linux server out of the house, as opposed to a distro that made it very easy to setup (with caveats), email hosting is something that is complex that I didn’t go with as I taught myself sysadmin stuff. From running Fedora Core, to now Ubuntu, I’ll need to figure that out as I debate my options for email, but that’s another post for a different time.

So far, I’m happy with nearlyfreespeech. It’s always been up, I can have multiple users, and for someone like me who just runs hobby sites, it should save me some money. (No matter what I tell myself, silwenae.com and such will never be big traffic generators). Silwenae.com on pixiehost is currently down again – even my wife who was hosting her site with them transferred to a new host. Now I need to get off my butt, get the silwenae.net server in my basement up this weekend, figure out my email and then start transferring websites.