Back in November, I wrote a post about how I moved to a VPS, for web hosting. Well, I moved again. Because I felt like it.
Host Web
There’s two things I like when it comes to hosting my website. Tinkering, and cheap costs. My VPS was around ~$5 per month, and I could tinker the shit out of it. That’s fun and all, but there were a few times my sites went down, because I broke something.
While looking around some blogs, I came across a web host that sounded interesting. NearlyFreeSpeech.Net. A cheap, flexible, pay as you go, and interesting web host that’s been around since 2002. Looking into it more, it’s a fully managed host, that still gives SSH 1 access… I’m intrigued.
Needless to say, I made an account, and started poking around.
It’s UNIX, I Know This
Things in NFSN are organized a little, differently. At the top is your membership, that’s what you log in with. Under that, is accounts. You can have as many accounts as you want. Each account, also has its own funding pool 2. Under an account, is your “sites”. Those “Sites” are FreeBSD containers. It’s a little odd till you use it. But it’s super flexible.
Those FreeBSD containers come chuck full of utilities, and languages. You can host way more than just a static site. The web server is also set up out of the box. Just add content, and go.
Fully Managed
Maybe I got a bit too used to a VPS. I went to enable HSTS and started looking up what I needed to do with web server. But all I had to do was login to the management site, and click a couple buttons. Also not having to check for OS and package updates every now and then is nice. NFSN does it for you.
So as you can guess (and by the past tense of this post), I made the switch. Moving both this site, and my photos site over.
The best part, not only is it cheeper 3, I also only had to change the address and path in my deployment script. Not the workflow.