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| Frequently Asked Questions |
We're doing the best job we can to ensure that there is no catch. But of course, there's always fine print. In order to convey your deposits into your personal bandwidth account, we have to charge you a small deposit fee. This is a substitute for the huge "setup fees" charged by some other providers.
Our deposit fee is presently $1.00 plus 3% of the amount of your deposit that is over $20. That means, if you make any deposit up to $20, you'll be charged $1.00 to cover our actual costs of handling the deposit and managing your account. If you deposit $50, you'll be charged $1.00 plus 3% of $30. If you deposit $100, you'll be charged $1.00 plus 3% of $80. This same fee is applied no matter how you make your deposit, including checks, credit cards, and PayPal.
However we don't want this fee to discourage people hosting small sites. Consequently, we also apply an instant rebate when you make a deposit of less than $20.00. Because the deposit fee is particularly onerous on the smallest deposits, rebates are generally largest for deposits of $5.00 and under.
For example, if you make a PayPal Microdeposit of $0.25, the deposit fee would ordinarily be $1.00, not a very good deal! However, at the time of this writing, the rebate for this transaction would be $0.94, leading to a net deposit of $0.19, the smallest deposit it is presently possible to make to establish service with us.
We do not profit from deposit fees.
We apologize for the need to make this so complicated. It is unfortunately necessary in order to provide you with the best possible pricing without running afoul of the conditions imposed upon us by our payment processors. We're constantly on the lookout for ways to reduce (or simplify!) these administrative costs, because they don't help us and they don't help you.
Beware of plans that promise a certain (large) amount of data transfer for a certain fixed monthly price. Often, such plans include huge amounts of disk space as well. But you pay that price regardless of what you actually use.
If your hosting plan offers 10,000GB for $10/mo, that sounds like $0.001/GB. We must be crazy; our prices aren't anywhere close to that! But what if your site only transfers 8GB one month? ($1.25/GB.) Or 5GB? ($2.00/GB.) Or 1GB? ($10.00/GB.) Suddenly our prices seem like the good kind of crazy! Big bundle hosts make big money off of people who are paying for a lot of capacity that they didn't really use.
When you use one of these services, if you use too little, you wind up paying a lot for it. It's true, if you use too much you might get away with it. But you might get hit with overage charges, or you might find yourself terminated for violating some obscure resource limit well before you use up the bandwidth or disk space they promised you.
Big bundles represent a bet: you're betting you'll use a lot of service, the hosting company is betting you won't. As with casinos, the bundles are packaged to look as favorable and attractive as possible, so it seems like a sure thing.
First off, ask yourself if you want a hosting company that is betting against the success of your site. Isn't that fundamentally wrong?
Second, when you take that bet, you're doing it based on a few hours of one-time research. The hosting companies you're betting against take those bets for a living, all day every day. They have all the info, they hold all the cards, and they make a lot of money.
It is possible to beat the odds and get a great deal. Like a casino, they can afford to let a few people "win" because so many people only think they do. But it's a lot of work to beat the system, and it's a new game every month.
We encourage you to think about the price you want to pay in terms of what you really use, not in terms of what you might have used, but didn't, or what you may use someday. If you're in the category where you're paying a lot for stuff you aren't using, give our service a try. If you're in the category where you're costing your host a lot more money than you pay, then our service might not be the one for you. :-)
Our service is pretty barebones, and it is priced accordingly. Whether your site is big or small, our usage-based pricing ensures that you pay a price that's fair to you and fair to us; not one penny more, not one penny less. If your site becomes successful and uses more resources, we'll make more money. That gives us a vested interest in ensuring that your site runs as well as possible, all the time.
So... if you think someone else is offering you a better deal, remember to ask yourself... wanna bet?
We have recently changed our pricing, and so we cannot currently offer good statistics for this. They will return in a few months. Until then, we recommend using our Pricing Estimator tool to get an idea of what your hosting costs might be.
We currently accept:
Online credit card and PayPal payments are processed immediately. Mail-in deposits take longer.
For our International members, we also support manual payments made through moneybookers.com. If you would like information about this option, please contact us.
We do not accept cash payments for the simple reason that cash sent through the mail all-too-frequently does not reach its destination. Even the US Postal Service acknowledges this and officially discourages the practice. You may use cash to obtain money orders from the United States Postal Service, Western Union, and many other vendors in the United States. Internationally, we recommend the use of American Express worldwide money orders denominated in US Dollars.
If you wish to pay us anonymously, contact us in advance to request special arrangements. As we have a very protective privacy policy, such requests will be granted only if there are extenuating circumstances.
Yes, absolutely! You can run CGI lisp, perl, python, ruby, and tcl scripts by putting them in your web space and giving them a .cgi extension. Our secure shell environment provides the necessary resources to compile and link C & C++ applications for use with CGI, though technical support is not generally available for such activities.
You can get a live snapshot of our available CGI languages and their current versions on this example page. There is also information about available Perl modules available. If you need special Perl modules installed, just let us know the CPAN name of the module you need and we will add it for you if at all possible.
Our default configuration provides PHP 5 with many of the most popular extensions. This page has an example of our default PHP configuration and links to the alternatives. We can install PEAR modules upon request, but we generally require them to be marked "stable" before we will make them available on the system.
SSI (server-side includes) can be used by naming your files with a .shtml extension.
Full MySQL support is available. We give you your own private MySQL process and full administrator privileges; there's no need to worry about other users trampling on your databases or trying to shoehorn several applications into a single database.
To help you manage your process remotely without having to install and maintain extra software, we provide a private installation of phpMyAdmin that can be used to access hosted processes easily.
We also support a number of common database libraries in both PHP and CGI applications, including SQLite, db4 and gdbm.
We do not support or plan to support PostgreSQL at this time.
No we do not.
We do, however, provide email forwarding service. You can set up as many different addresses at your domain as you like, specifying where each one should be forwarded and/or use "catchall" forwarding to send everything to a single address.
The first choice, and often the best one, is to use the email account(s) provided by your ISP for this, but there are other options. Many of our members choose to use free email services like Google's Gmail, MSN Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. Any of these will work with our email forwarding.
For more elaborate email hosting requirements, you may wish to investigate companies like HostMail or Everyone.net. These also work very well in conjunction with our service.
Yes, almost any directive that can be placed in an Apache .htaccess file will work on our system. The most significant ones that will not work are those that perform access control based on IP address; due to our network architecture, IP blocking is performed before requests reach .htaccess and must be configured separately.
At this time, we provide only HTTP (web hosting) using our customized (Apache-based) server platform. This limits the applications we support to those that work through CGI or PHP. A partial list of servers that will not work with our system includes:
Lots! Here's a partial list of the ones most frequently asked about or used:
Yes! Our DNS service meets most simple DNS and email service requirements for the average website. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET DNS supports most common resource record types (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, SRV, TXT, and PTR).
No.
Compared to the endless parade of hosts that provide tons of "one-click installs," one-size-fits-all web site templates, unlimited toll-free telephone support, and cookie-cutter control panels, our service is arcane and complex. We consider this a positive.
Our service is designed for people who are comfortable with Unix-based web hosting, including manipulating MySQL and files using command line tools. To get good results for nontrivial sites, our members need to understand how Unix file permissions and ownership work, and how they apply in a secure web hosting environment.
We do provide extensive documentation, including a massive FAQ, that addresses a large number of the most common inquiries we receive. Because we employ neither "canned answers" to inquiries for support nor underpaid "tier 1" support personnel to give them, we do tend to refer people to the documentation when their questions have detailed and complete answers there.
But if our systems are working properly, we expect that most of our members should never need to contact support. By extension, they should not have to pay extra to maintain a staff of people they never use. Consequently, our free technical support is extremely limited; our primary individual support option costs extra, and even that has fairly strict limits as far as how much help we can provide.
We have found that most of our successful members are those who have previous experience with web hosting. This is, however, a gross generalization. We have plenty of members who have made amazing sites starting from ground zero because they are strongly self-motivated and learn well independently. It's cool for us to watch them learn, too.
If you are not comfortable that you already have the knowledge and experience outlined here, and you do not particularly want to acquire it, that's a perfectly valid position, but it means that using our service may be an exercise in frustration for you that is best avoided.
We have our own custom control panel that is as unique as the rest of our service. While it is in no danger of winning any awards for its great beauty, it does allow you to control most aspects of our service without resorting to complicated configuration files. The major benefits of this custom environment are:
There's no "demo" of our control panel, but you can create a membership and kick the real thing around for yourself. Naturally, doing so is completely free. To get a basic idea, all you need to provide is a login name, the name you want us to call you, and a working email address.
To get a better idea, we recommend that you create a personal bandwidth account, which will require your basic information (real name, address, etc.), but don't worry, our privacy policy has your back. No payment information is needed to check out the control panel. So please try creating an account; you might be surprised by what happens next!
Any program that can upload to our system using the FTP Internet protocol should work. Our members have successfully used Microsoft Front Page, Adobe GoLive, Adobe PageMill, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and other programs to create web pages and upload them to our system. Some people have used Microsoft Publisher successfully, but it seems to do something that makes web pages far larger than the same pages created in other programs. This makes them take up extra space and take longer to download, with no visible benefit, so we do not recommend it.
In addition to regular FTP, we also offer SFTP (Secure FTP) and scp support should you wish to upload your files under the aegis of strong encryption.
Of course, since we offer ssh-secured shell access, you are equally welcome to use vi as your HTML editing tool if you prefer. (Or emacs, pico, nano, and others.)
Our system is very flexible in this regard. Each membership can have one or more accounts. Each account can have one or more sites. Each site can have one or more domain names. For many people, this means one membership, one account, one site, and one domain name. For many others, it gives them the power to be as creative as they want, and to pursue several different goals.
Whether you spread your websites across multiple accounts or keep them all in one is completely up to you. Support for multiple accounts allows people who have sites for different reasons, such as business and personal, to keep the finances separate if they choose to do so.
Please see Abuse @ NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.
Please review our Terms and Conditions of Service.
Our primary requirements in this area are as follows:
If you have questions about whether your proposed site is legal, you need to consult an attorney. Under no circumstances can we give a legal opinion or advice, nor can we make binding statements about hypothetical sites and circumstances.
*You must obey all applicable local laws unless you get our prior express consent in writing. We do provide anonymous hosting of content that violates local government censorship laws at our sole discretion in cases outside the United States where we feel government censorship is contrary to the cause of freedom.
If you have questions about our willingness to put up with controversial or unpopular sites that are nonetheless legal, we invite you to review our Abuse @ NearlyFreeSpeech.NET page.
Our member interface includes a feature called a "Secure Support Request" which you can use to submit requests for assistance, or if you need us to do something related to your service. We also accept support requests via email for general questions that do not require us to verify your identity or to do something that would affect your hosting. We do not offer telephone support.
We know what it's like to get miserably bad customer service, and we have set up our system based on those experiences. Here are a few examples.
We also maintain a detailed technical FAQ for our members as well as Member Forums populated by some very, very smart people.
For more information about the extent of the technical support we provide, please see this related FAQ entry.
The same thing that happens if your site uses less than $0.01 in a day, in a week, or in a year: it keeps going until it does.
We aren't really interested in months. The amount of bandwidth you use is carried over as long as it takes until you accumulate a penny's worth of usage (at least 10,737,418 bytes), even if that takes a month or more.
Yes, we are happy to host sites like this.
Yes.
We have a corporate policy that we do not offer services that consume IP address space on a per-site or per-user basis. The most common example of this is when a web site is assigned one (or more) static IP addresses, but it also applies to SSL (https) sites and anonymous FTP sites.
Assigning static IP addresses on a per-site basis is a practice that has devastated the Internet address space, so we don't participate in it. Tens of thousands of IP addresses can be assigned to a single rack of equipment in a datacenter somewhere, but there is a shortage of IP address space. That's not the right way to do things.
We regard this as an "Internet environmental" issue, and it's one about which we're prepared to be a little extremist. Basically, we believe that it's wrong for us to do it, so we don't do it. Not everyone agrees with us, and we definitely do lose business because of this position.
For standards-compliant web hosting (HTTP/1.1), there is no need to assign a static IP address, and no supported browser remains available that requires this. Static IP addresses also severely limit our ability to reroute around equipment that has problems or is being maintained, and even makes it tougher for you to benefit from our load balancing technology.
The most common reason people request a static IP address is to point external DNS at a site hosted with us. As part of our hosting service, we provide our own special DNS records for each site that you can link to external DNS using the CNAME capability that work even better than static IPs. These records preserve full fault tolerance and load balancing.
Not at this time.
The "HTTPS" standard for SSL-secured web sites has a fundamental design problem that causes it to require one IP address per site to work properly. See this related question for information about why we will not assign IP addresses on a per-site basis.
We will continue to evaluate proposed changes to the https and SSL/TLS standards that might enable us to offer this service in the future, because for some, free speech also means being able to access information without being monitored or fearing reprisal.
We are also conducting independent research in this area which may lead to a compromise solution.
Yes we do.
See this page for full information about our integrated domain name registration services.
Here are the things we are most often asked about that do not work with our service:
It's been suggested that publicly posting information about our technical limitations isn't savvy marketing, but if our service isn't going to work for you, we want you to know that before you sign up if at all possible.
You may contact us at any time to close your membership and cancel your service. When you do, we will return the money remaining in your personal bandwidth account. All of it.* You're only responsible for the cost of services that you actually use.
If you try out our service and figure out the same day (by early evening) that it is not right for you, let us know right away. Sometimes, but not always, we can void your transaction so that you will not only get a refund, but it will be as if you were never even charged. We can't promise that, but if you let us know fast enough, we will do our best for you.
Please note that we cannot issue a partial refund of your balance; we can only issue a full refund, and only in conjunction with the close of your membership. Also, if you have any domains registered through us, you will obviously need to transfer them to another registrar or authorize us to delete them (without a refund) before requesting cancellation.
*If we have to mail you a check, there will be a small charge, and we won't issue a refund for a balance less than the charge. See our Terms and Conditions of Service for complete details.
Our hosting platform uses a network of distributed, fault-tolerant, load-balancing shared servers. Sites are automatically distributed across the servers to make the best use of resources based on the popularity of the site and the capacity of the server. As a result, there is no need to fear having busy or CPU intensive sites on the same server slow you down; our system will re-balance them automatically.
Our system will send you email reminders when your account is running low on funds (and of course it will let you know if you run completely out). The reminder levels come pre-configured at $5.00 and $1.00, but you can add, change, or remove them at will.
No.
Our pricing plan is designed to be fair to you and fair for us. It represents our actual cost to provide the service. In the case of storage, for instance, this is literally true: all revenue from storage charges is channeled directly into the purchase of additional hardware. And by "hardware" we don't mean a company Hummer.
Our pricing plan is simple and straightforward as well as very competitive. You pay for what you use, and you don't pay for what you don't use. That's all there is to it.
Prices that appear better than ours fall into to two categories: big bundles and temporary loss leaders. Our thoughts on big bundles are detailed elsewhere. As for loss leaders, as long as the hosting business exists, there will be somebody offering free or below-cost service because they think adding customers is more important than building a sustainable service. Competing on price with every free-today-gone-tomorrow hosting provider that comes along would simply guarantee that we'd lose what really makes our service the best deal: its simplicity, honesty, and sustainability.
It's not easy. For one thing, we keep overhead to a minimum. No fancy multi-acre Silicon Valley office palaces with slides and wandering masseurs here. No business development teams. No commission-driven sales force. Also, we use our buying power to force our providers to give us the same deal we give you: we pay only for what we use, which helps us stay profitable. Lastly, we try to avoid doing stupid things that make no sense just because we heard someone else made a lot of money that way. That really helps.
This is not a loss leader, a limited time offer, or restricted to only certain people. This is our business model, and it works.
Microsoft Front Page (the web page designing program) works just fine with our system.
We're sorry, but our service does not support Microsoft FrontPage Extensions (almost the same name, completely different technology) or Microsoft Active Server Pages. There are presently no plans to add support for these technologies.
We do this for three good reasons:
We say: go visit SomebodyElse.com. Look for their affiliate program. Find out if your web designer is getting a kickback for referring you. Some providers pay 10% or more every month.
Affiliate programs make it difficult for a web designer to make objective recommendations about what's good for your business. So good web designers generally don't participate in affiliate programs, and you can rely on their advice. We don't have an affiliate program, so when someone recommends us, you can be comfortable that it's because they like us.
On the other hand, maybe your designer has had good luck with somebody else and knows that they provide the quality service you need at a competitive price. In a case like that, sometimes it's better to go that way. Few roads are better than the ones one knows best. We'll be here if you need us.
We do not offer dedicated hosting, because at our prices it would take centuries to recoup the cost of even the most barebones servers and we like to upgrade much more often than that.
However, some people have actually found that due to the specialized nature of the machines in our network and the fact that each one is devoted solely to its particular job, our service can actually exceed the performance of a dedicated server (particularly one with only a single desktop-grade hard drive) for some applications.
Our system will attempt to allow any reasonable deposit. Presently, PayPal micropayments can be made as small as $0.25.
There is no minimum balance needed to create a site, but your balance must be at least $0.01 if you want it to work. :-)
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is not a public company, and we are not seeking private investments at this time. We are a real business, organically grown and designed to last, not a venture capital/IPO/bankruptcy Ponzi scheme.
No, we will not. Our design skills are horrifyingly bad anyway. We like to stick to what we're good at, which is hosting sites, not creating them. Our current public site reflects this.
Your website will be automatically disabled. As soon as you add more, it'll come back, but that can take 15-20 minutes and that often feels like the longest 15 minutes of your life, so we recommend using the account balance warning system to keep track of things before they go that far.
If you don't add more funds right away, your account will hang around for 30 days. You can add more funds at any point during that period and get it all back. After that, your account and sites will be permanently removed in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
Please see Abuse @ NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.
On our system, a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. Hard drive manufacturers would have you believe that it's 1,000,000,000 bytes, but we don't sell hard drives.
(Technically 1,073,741,824 bytes is a gibibyte, but we have a hard time calling it that without a childish urge to snicker, and nobody likes a snickerer. If you want to be strictly accurate, the hard drive manufacturers are right, and we bill storage and bandwidth based on gibibytes* and mebibytes* (1,048,576 bytes), not gigabytes and megabytes. Someday we'll grow up about this, but that day has not yet arrived.)
*Must... keep from... snickering.
No. The costs of such a program would be more than the actual interest produced. We periodically reevaluate this situation, because we think a web account that runs forever purely off of its own interest is a pretty cool idea.
Of course! This is a great way to give our service a test run and slash your costs at the same time. Images, video files, and all types of downloads are popular candidates for this type of arrangement.
Please see Abuse @ NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.
No we do not.
Nope. Aren't those annoying?
No, that would be silly. If our service goes down, you'll never be charged in the first place! We only charge you for the bandwidth you actually use. If the service is down... well, you aren't using any bandwidth!
This business model has another profound consequence. In the event of a service failure, our revenue craters on the spot until it is fixed. The technical term for that is "motivation." For this reason, we do not offer any service level agreements or uptime guarantees other than "you will get the very best we have to offer."
By way of disclaimer, the above applies only to bandwidth charges. Storage and other charges have always continued to apply during network outages. We don't know what we would do if we ever had a storage-but-not-bandwidth outage severe enough that it would round up to a penny, since it's never happened. If it ever does, we'll try to do the right thing.
Yes. Our NearlyFreeSpeech.NET DNS service allows unlimited subdomains under a single domain name at no additional charge.
Please be aware, however, that we do not use the subdomain-is-subdirectory hack (unfortunately) made popular by a certain brand of web hosting control panel software. You can use our service to create multiple independent sites and then assign or remove names from one or more NearlyFreeSpeech.NET DNS domains at your discretion. There is no connection between a site and a domain name or subdomain other than what you create, and there is no correlation at all between subdirectories of a site and subdomains of a domain.
Subdomains can be associated with sites we host by adding them as aliases. If you're a member, see this member FAQ entry for more information.
A "major slashdotting" of a site hosted on our service will cost you (on average) less than $10, one time. The best part about that is that as soon as it's over, your costs go back to normal, but you'll save any usage-based discount resulting from the traffic burst. There's no higher-tier pricing to get permanently pushed into, and we won't cancel you for having something to say that people actually want to hear.
This happens to one of our members about once a week, so you can bet we know how to handle it. Or rather, our systems do. Our load-adaptive clustering technology is at its best when handling demand surges, and our pricing is at its best when you'd prefer not to be billed based on a 1% event the other 99% of the time.
When you create your website on our service, you will be asked to give it a "short name," which is a brief one-word name for your site that must be unique across our entire service, and we give you a built-in hostname based on that.
For example, if you choose example as your site's short name, you will always be able to access it as http://example.nfshost.com/.
If you don't want DNS or a domain of your own, you're welcome to use this name for your site at no additional cost. If you do use a domain of your own, then having your site available under this alternate name may help you troubleshoot any problems during the setup process, as well as provide a backup if there is ever a problem with your domain.
A MySQL process can contain as many databases as you wish. You can also create multiple MySQL processes if you wish, but doing so will cost more than placing all your databases in a single process.
A "membership" represents you as a person. It's how you identify yourself to us, and how you use our services.
An "account" is how you pay for our services. It contains the funds that you use to purchase hosting. You might have multiple accounts, if you want, but you don't have to. Just as one membership can have several accounts, one account can fund several sites.
It's a little like a bank. You are one person, but you might have two savings accounts: one for college, and one for "rainy days." The bank (if they know you at all these days) knows that you are just one person.
What you cannot do is have two memberships. That would be like opening an account at your bank, then going out to your car, putting on a fake moustache, and going back in to open a second account.* You could, but why?
*At least, I assume it's like that, but I've never actually tried it. My bank has a pretty good sense of humor, but why push my luck?
Because the servers we buy and the bandwidth we obtain are very competitively priced, but they still do cost money, as do the people that run them.
We get this question from two different angles. First, there are always people who just want something for nothing. Unfortunately, we don't have much to offer those people.
The second angle comes from people who would like to see us offer some sort of ad-sponsored free service. There are two primary reasons we have not pursued that:
Of the two, storage is easier to understand. Just like you, we have hard drives (except larger and probably more expensive) and we store the files that make up your site on them. Storage refers to how much space those files take up. Storage billing is measured in units called megabyte-months, which refers to one megabyte stored on our system for one month.
Bandwidth, on the other hand, refers to the amount of data that is sent out when people visit your site. Bandwidth is measured in units of gigabytes. If your page (including any the graphics and such that go with it) takes up one megabyte of space, then about a thousand people (1024 actually) would have to download the whole thing to get to a gigabyte of bandwidth, and that's what you'd be billed for.
No, of course not. That wouldn't really be your site.
Your site will have on it exactly what you put there, and nothing else.
Naturally, if you want to put banners or ads on your site, you're welcome to do so, what with it being your site and all.
It's simple. We don't want to confuse people into thinking we're anything like other hosting providers. Our simple, text-based layout is designed to load fast, to be easy to use, and not to try to distract you from making an informed decision about us. As if that's not enough, we also think Jakob Nielsen is pretty cool.
So, sure, we could follow the crowd and get stock graphics of impressive racks of equipment and inspired-looking people staring blankly into space. We've even been told we can't possibly be taken seriously as a hosting company unless we have them. But we're not buying. Those other companies can keep the sort of people who make hosting decisions based on how cute the model on the home page is. Our members are way too smart for that, and that's just how we like it.
And psst, we'll let you in on a little secret. Not all of our servers are the same color. Scandalous, we know.
Please see this page for complete information.
No, our domain registrations services are provided on a cost-recovery basis as a service to our hosting members, and are not intended to be used as a standalone product. We are not, nor do we have any interest in being, a general-purpose domain registration provider.
Consequently, while we do not impose any restrictions on the use of our domain registration and RespectMyPrivacy.COM services, our system is specially designed to facilitate use of registered domains with our hosting services. If you wish to use these services for other purposes, you are welcome to do so, but it may require additional effort on your part to set up. We will also not be able to provide technical support for usage of domains in conjunction with third-party services.
Yes. CGI processes and individual ssh commands are limited to two to five minutes of CPU time, and PHP requests are limited to three minutes of wall-clock time.
These restrictions are designed to catch runaway processes, not to interfere with ordinary usage. "Stock" web applications, specifically including phpBB and WordPress, simply do not use enough resources to encounter these limits. Who would wait three minutes for a web page to load anyway?
Although we do not impose a overall specific per-site CPU limit, ours is a shared hosting service. Please do not sign up for our service expecting to use our hardware (either ssh or CGI/PHP) as if it were your own dedicated server, as this will not be allowed.
One important related restriction to be aware of is that we do not allow persistant processes of any sort.
Our service is designed for people who are largely self-sufficient. For that reason, we do not build into our basic fee structure any cost recovery for technical support and our support offerings are comparatively limited.
For information about our free and paid support options, please see our public site.
Yes, but. Because of the ever-present threat of spam, we monitor email usage very closely. Therefore, you should expect an amount of scrutiny directly proportional to the volume of email you send.
It is also very important to be aware of potential vulnerabilities introduced by email-enabled web pages. In particular, generic PHP "feedback" form scripts have proven to be very popular targets for spammers, who can find and exploit them automatically. You should be extremely cautious, and make sure that any email-enabled web sites you create are safe from exploit.
We will hold you responsible for email activity caused by your site, whether you intended to allow it or not. If a spammer exploits a script on your site to send spam, we will have to clean up the mess. At a minimum, that will probably entail temporarily disabling your site, and it may result in additional charges for you.
Please be aware that when we address questions of this nature, we cannot speak to hypothetical situations, nor can we guess what we would have done in a situation where we were not involved. Nor we can offer you legal advice.
In the United States, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) defines the process by which a copyright holder can request that material be removed. In such cases, a provider is legally obligated to remove the allegedly infringing material without judging the merits of the claim. It is essentially done on the copyright holder's sworn say-so.
However, the DMCA also governs the process for restoring material, and that process is similarly rubber-stamp on the part of the service provider. Once that's done, it becomes a matter for the courts, not the service provider.
In this regard, the DMCA is a good law for us and for you. (Although it can and does suck in many areas, this isn't one of them.) The DMCA is, in part, supposed to protect you from capricious decisions made by the service provider based on some subset of the facts. At no point does or should an Internet service provider investigate or make judgment calls about complex copyright law and questions of what might be infringing. (We specialize in server processes, not process servers.) The DMCA gives us (and you) a certain (non-perfect) confidence that the copyright owner's claim has at least some legitimacy, and provides decent protection (once you get over the initial take-down hurdle) against the use of false claims of copyright infringement to suppress legitimate content.
If you wish to host a controversial site in the US, it behooves you to know the law, particularly this one, and how to use it to your advantage in the event of a dispute. You should also be prepared for a downtime of some or all "allegedly infringing" material for a couple of weeks if the copyright owner wants to fight.
We adhere to the entire law very closely. We do not generally pull the plug on an entire site if, for example, someone claims that a single graphic is infringing. We do our best to remove only the content that the copyright owner specifically identifies as allegedly infringing. We allow and encourage the use of the "putback notification" process when material is incorrectly identified as infringing. But we do not automatically terminate a member's service merely for receiving a complaint alleging infringement. (However, actually infringing someone's copyright does violate our TACOS and will generally result in immediate termination.)
Keep in mind that while we aren't lawyers, neither are we idiots. We can tell the difference between people harassing our members via the DMCA and cases where our service is genuinely being misused, and we can adjust our attitude accordingly. Fortunately, both of these cases are very rare.
Please see this page for complete information on this message and how to eliminate it.
We are happy to receive reports about problems, no matter what the source. However, if you report a technical problem with someone else's services, you may get a frustrating response.
Our Privacy Policy doesn't allow us to discuss our members' services with other people without the affected member's consent. That includes problems and our efforts to fix them or alert the affected member. Therefore, we can respond to problem reports from the public only by acknowledging the problem so you know we received your report. Unless the problem is specific to you, we will not provide you with any additional information.
Sometimes, people interpret our inability to discuss the problem as blowing them off or that we're not going to do anything about it. This is not the case at all, it is merely an artifact of properly enforcing our Privacy Policy.
What does discussing problems have to do with our Privacy Policy? Although the simple answer is that our members' services are nobody's business but theirs until they tell us otherwise, the practical reason for this is a little more complicated.
Take a simple example: from time to time we get reports like, "I went to www.example.com and it was down! Fix it! You people suck! Your servers suck!" While we can generally say "Yes, the site is down," we do not go into why or when it might be back in response to such a report, which sometimes means the person goes away believing that not only do we suck, but we suck on purpose!
There are many reasons a web site might be offline. Maybe the person couldn't pay. If it was your site, would you want us discussing your billing status with anybody who asks? Probably not. But if we respond back to all "site down" complaints but only stonewall the ones where billing is involved, stonewalling just becomes a substitute for saying that it's a billing problem. So, to protect our members' privacy, we must treat everything as a private matter even if it makes us look like we're unwilling or unable to fix a problem.
(Those who are paying attention may have noticed the similarity to the old philosophical problem of encryption: if you only encrypt things when you have something to hide, using encryption is a clear sign that you have something to hide. For encryption to be maximally effective, you have to encrypt as much as you possibly can. Others may have had similar experiences trying to find out the condition of their hospitalized friend.)
So, if you are a member of the general public, please do not assume the worst of us because we won't discuss a problem you found. We ask that you remember that our Privacy Policy is a promise to protect our members all the time, not just when it's convenient for you or when it makes us look good. Your patience and understanding will be appreciated.
Of course this does not apply to our members and their own services. If you're having a problem with your NearlyFreeSpeech.NET services, you can always expect full disclosure regarding any issues and our full support in helping to resolve the problem.
Please feel free to report downed sites or other technical problems with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET services to support@NearlyFreeSpeech.NET even if you are not a NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member (or if you are, but not the owner of the services in question). We want to make sure our members' services stay working at all times, and we'll take any tip we can get when something might be amiss.
If you are a member and there's a problem with your services, make sure to use our Secure Support Request facility so we can get started right away and not have to goof around making sure it's you.
We do not provide spam protection per se. As a forwarding server if we discarded spam messages, any "false positives" that were incorrectly flagged as spam would be forever lost. That obviously won't work.
Complicating this, not all of our members are alike. They have a broad difference of opinion about what constitutes spam and/or undesirable messages. Some people provide tech support and need to be able to receive forwarded copies of spam and viruses that most of the rest of us would never want. One size does not fit all!
What we do instead is enforce strict restrictions on the email servers that attempt to send email through our forwarding systems. These restrictions are no problem for legitimate email servers (they should all be passed by default on a properly-configured system) but they represent a tough barrier for the sort of compromised, virus-infected servers that send most of the world's spam. This blocks most illegitimate messages based on delivery mechanisms, not the context of the message. If you want, you can read all about our Email Acceptance Policy.
Although a fair amount of spam slips through this net, it has been pre-screened in such a way that a client-side junk email filter, such as those offered by most email software, can rely on information about its delivery to be accurate and therefore do an excellent job of filtering the spam according to your specific personal criteria without becoming confused by all kinds of forgeries and maliciously-crafted messages.
Naturally, whatever email server ultimately handles the messages we forward for you may also impose content-based junk email filters.
The net result of this is a highly effective, layered defense that, through its dependence on client software under your control, best meets your specific needs.
In many cases, the site operator has contact information on the site itself. That obviously represents the best way to reach them. If such information is not available but the site has a registered domain (i.e. the site name does not end in "nfshost.com"), you may wish to consult the public whois information for the domain, which is generally required to include accurate contact information.
If the site operator chooses not to include contact information on the site and is not using a registered domain, you may safely conclude that they do not wish to be contacted.
Unfortunately our staff are not able to act as a go-between messaging service between site operators and people who wish to contact them; we simply do not have the resources. Please do not contact us directly with messages for site operators, as we will not be able to assist you.
It is our policy not to comment on member sites.
This is a tough question. We do host websites that get attacked by a wide variety of different methods. However, the variety is so wide that there is no "typical" attack scenario or "average" outcome that we can offer as an example.
At any given time, our network is typically experiencing between zero and three denial-of-service (DOS) or distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. Most are short, lasting only a few minutes or hours, but the longest lasted for over a month. Most are not service-disrupting, but occasionally they can render a member site inaccessible, and rarely, if they are significant enough, large-scale DDOS attacks can sometimes briefly disrupt our entire service. (This is equally true of all web hosts.)
To help protect our members' sites, we employ a large number of passive network features like connection filtering and firewalls. These are generally very effective against the everyday attacks we most frequently experience. When attacks go beyond the simple, an active response by NearlyFreeSpeech.NET personnel is typically required. Our active response to attacks on member sites (or on our service itself) is roughly proportional to the square of the disruption caused; our response escalates very quickly as attacks become more severe. Thanks to our long experience in the area, we have a wide arsenal of tools that can be dynamically employed or tuned to help mitigate serious attacks. We take keeping our members' sites online very seriously!
Having your site attacked does sometimes consume resources, e.g. bandwidth, that we charge for. The cost of such an attack depends on the type, scale, and duration of the attack, as well as in large part on your actions before and during the attack. Since these factors are not under our control, vary widely, and cannot be accurately predicted, we will not under any circumstances attempt to estimate what the financial implications of a hypothetical attack might be. If you want such an estimate, simply figure out the bandwidth that would be used based on the size of your site and the anticipated volume of requests.
However, since our service is paid in advance, you always have complete control over your maximum financial liability simply by controlling the balance of your account. If you feel your site is attack-prone and you are primarily concerned about costs, we encourage you to maintain a low account balance to limit your exposure. Then, if a situation arises, you will be able to make an informed decision about your best course of action before incurring any significant expenses. If you feel your site is attack-prone and you are primarily concerned about availability, we suggest that you maintain a larger account balance and customize our account balance warning feature to notify you if your expenses spike in an abnormal way.
Our service is based on personal responsibility. Although our TACOS ensure that you have broad discretion in choosing what to say on your your site, if you choose to say something controversial then you must be prepared to be first in line to bear the consequences. We will not indemnify you or waive any costs you incur arising from an attack on a site you host; we are a hosting provider, not an insurance provider.
In all cases, if you are concerned about your site being attacked, you are your own first and best line of defense. You should design a site that is lightweight and fast-loading so that it remains available under heavy load and minimizes bandwidth cost.
If you run into a problem with someone attacking your site or trying to bleed your funds dry, please feel free to contact us. It is absolutely not our intention to sit back and laugh while someone drains your account, whether your site content provoked the attack or not. In some cases, we can block obvious troublemakers and certain types of attacks so they will not reach your site. But since you are the site operator, we will expect you to take all reasonable measures to protect yourself first. Example 1: If someone is posting rude comments on your forum site, you will need to use your forum's blocking features to handle it. Example 2: If someone writes a script to repeatedly download the largest static banner graphic on your site, we may be able to block their IP address for you.
With all that said, it's worth noting that most sites will never be attacked directly and have absolutely nothing to worry about in this area. Even given our libertarian TACOS, fewer than 0.1% of our hosted sites have ever been targeted by noteworthy attacks.
Not at all! It's true that our libertarian attitude toward personal responsibility attracts a handful of controversial websites, some of which make a person wonder, "Ok, sure, you can say that, but why?" However, the vast majority of sites we host (greater than 99.9%) are perfectly ordinary blogs, forums, wikis, and personal pages run by people just like you.
For the bulk of our member base, the "fringe" web sites we host frequently serve as the proverbial canary in the coal mine: they act as our global censorship early warning system. As long as the fringe sites can remain online, we can all be confident that the rest of us with more moderate views have real freedom to express ourselves. When people attack such sites or attempt to get them shut down, we learn more about what techniques (legal and technological) we need to use to keep your site protected.
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET isn't necessarily about saying something controversial. In a lot of cases, it's merely about knowing that if you need to someday, you won't find out that your freedom to do so atrophied away while you weren't looking.
The short answer is that fraudsters and thieves wrecked it for you.
While we support the notion of Tor on an ideological level, our real-world experience with Tor has consisted of extensive problems with Tor-sourced hacking attempts and an unsustainable level of Tor-sourced credit card fraud. We also encountered relentless exploitation by spammers and phishers using Tor to create throwaway accounts. (Sign up, create site, send spam, get caught, sign up, create site, send spam, get caught, sign up...)
For that reason, we do not allow you to access our secure members site via the Tor network unless you already have a membership and a funded personal bandwidth account and you explicitly request that it be allowed via our secure support request system. (All of which must be done without using the Tor network.) We choose not to allow it automatically so we can filter approvals based on the common sense of a real person, and to protect members who don't use Tor from Tor-based brute force attacks on their password.
We understand that it isn't the existence of the Tor network that makes these things possible, but it does make them easy, and when virtually all of the traffic from a certain source is malevolent, blocking that source can be the only option. Forcing people off of Tor at least long enough to confirm their membership and make an initial deposit may not be the ideal solution, but it's hard to argue with results.
If you know of a reliable way for us to distinguish a handful of good people amidst a throng of would-be criminals in an environment that's raison d'être is to make distinguishing people impossible, please let us know. So far, making sure we already have a relationship with the good people is the best we've come up with.
Completely separate from that, we also have concerns about reports of unscrupulous Tor exit node operators diverting SSL connections. We don't know if this is true, but I have personally experienced a case where using a particular exit node led to SSL certificate mismatches when accessing a site where I knew no such mismatch existed. You should think carefully about passing any secure information through the Tor network.
Our system used to block accesses from you if you were merely running a Tor transit node (aka a Tor relay), as opposed to using the Tor network to access us, or running a Tor exit node yourself. We believe we have adjusted our system such that merely running a Tor transit node will not cause you to be blocked. If you run a Tor transit node and you're blocked, please contact us.
If you are running a Tor exit node, you'll have to cut back to relay-only, and do so long enough for the change to be picked up, before you can sign up.
In most cases, we do not allow our members to remain anonymous.
In general, the concern is that information not be disclosed to third parties. Our industry-leading privacy policy reflects our commitment not to let that happen. Therefore, from our perspective, there are very few legitimate reasons why a member would need to conceal his or her identity from us. Most people who request anonymous hosting are attempting to perpetrate fraud (on us or on the public) or wish to escape accountability for their actions.
At NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, we believe that with great power comes great responsibility, so we take a dim view of such behavior. For that reason, our TACOS require our members to provide complete and correct contact information, and requests for anonymous hosting are typically denied.
However, we do make one important exception. If you live outside the United States and can demonstrate that the site you wish to host would put you at significant, legitimate risk of retaliation from a government with a documented track record of reprisal against people who speak out against it, we may be able to help. Anonymous hosting is serious business; it can be one component of a coordinated plan to protect you and your family from torture and murder. It's absolutely not an option you can use to dodge lawsuits or unpopularity arising from hosted material.
If you feel you need this level of protection, please contact us, taking appropriate privacy precautions with respect to your correspondence. Be sure to explain where you live, what you want to host, and while you feel hosting the material anonymously is the only way to guarantee your safety. Be very specific; you will need to explain your situation in enough detail so we can make an informed decision. We may, in our sole discretion, decide to waive the contact information requirement in exchange for periodic reviews of your site content by NearlyFreeSpeech.NET personnel to verify that your usage of the service is consistent with your claims. Please be aware that even if we approve your request, paying anonymously is extremely difficult.
We regret we are not able to provide anonymous hosting to residents of the United States under any circumstances.
Please don't attempt to circumvent our restrictions on anonymous hosting by using fake contact information. Sooner or later we'll figure it out and terminate your membership. And, since you gave us fake information, we won't even be able to give you a refund.
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET provides our members a very specific service: it is designed for people who want to tinker with their website at a very low level and squeeze every last drop out of it. We are in some respects similar to an auto parts store, rather than a mechanic. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET will sell you an alternator for your '72 Impala*, but both the responsibility to determine that the '72 Impala needs an alternator, and the job of installing it remain with the customer. All the knobs, tweaks, options, and flexibility we provide can become a real frustration for a person who just wants to be done already.
Furthermore, as a small business, we understand that one of the keys to success is for the principals to spend as much time as possible focusing on the high-skill areas and as little time as possible on "have to" stuff, including accounting, legal issues, and building web pages. Every minute that we spend on something that we're barely competent or outright bad at is a minute we're not spending leaving the competition in the dust. Thus, we try to outsource as many of those tasks as possible so we can focus on doing what we're actually good at.
For that reason, in general, we find it difficult to recommend our service to new and small businesses; it's often better to pay (a lot) more and get a turnkey solution. But there are two exceptions to this:
First, for a lot of businesses these days, the website is the business. If you're a high-tech person trying to build a small business around a dynamic web site and you need advanced control over the programming and site configuration, as well as excellent speed and scalability at minimal cost, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET may well be perfect for you.
Second, the economic realities of new businesses often dictate that the owners have to do some of the things that are outside of their core skills. If money is tighter than time and the alternative is not to have a site, the ability to create a site at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET for pennies may be priceless, even if it takes a little more work.**
*As long as your '72 Impala supports HTTP and is hosted on our service.
**But don't expect to see any "NearlyFreeSpeech.NET: It's better than nothing!" marketing campaigns.
To make sure you receive automated system emails from us (including signup confirmations, password resets, account balance warnings, domain renewal notices, and other automatic service-affecting messages), make sure you are allowing email from notify@NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.
To make sure you receive any handwritten emails from us, make sure you are allowing email from support@NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. Finally, each support ticket is assigned a unique email address @support.nearlyfreespeech.net (but we don't get too many reports of those being blocked).
We won't send you any spam or unnecessary messages from any of these addresses.
If you're not receiving email from us, the first thing to check is your junk mail folder. Since our system is highly automated, junk mail filters occasionally incorrectly flag the messages it sends as spam. If you don't find them there, check your junk mail settings. Some email providers make it very easy to block a sender and silently delete such messages, making it very hard for you to figure out later that the sender is blocked.
Hotmail is one such provider. To check your blocked senders list:
(If you have information about how to check this with other free email providers, please drop us a line. Yahoo! mail users, in particular, seem to have a rough time with selective delivery.)
If you're still unable to resolve a problem receiving email from us or our system, please feel free to contact us. Ironically, you'll probably have to do that by email, but if the problem is with receiving automatic messages, we'll have a real person write back. Write to us from the email address you're having trouble with, and we'll look up the fate of any messages we tried to send there. If there's a problem on our end, we'll fix it. If there's a problem on your end, we'll try to find a way to provide you with the relevant log entries so you can ask your email provider what the heck is going on.
Not directly. There are two primary problems with this.
First, we do not support SSL.
Second, we are a shared hosting provider. The credit card issuers impose security requirements on the acceptance of credit cards that prevent you from accepting or storing credit card information on any shared server. Even if we did support SSL, that still means us.
In order to accept credit cards and most other payments, you will need to use a third-party secure checkout service. Examples that are known to work include Authorize.Net Server Integration Method, PayPal Checkout, and Google Checkout.
By default, we do not allow public HTTP (web) or IRC proxies because such proxies will be abused by spammers within minutes of discovery. It just saves time to say "no" up front rather than wait and shut it down later after there's a problem.
If you need to set up a private web proxy for your personal use that is appropriately access-limited, that is typically no problem as long as your use of it is legitimate.
No. If you are concerned that you might encounter problems with the content you want to publish, we'd strongly advise that you consult an attorney familiar with such issues. We can't provide legal advice, and don't offer a service that is intended to (or by any stretch of the imagination, could) protect our members from everything they might bring upon themselves by what they choose to publish.
Free speech is a responsibility, and it is important that our members understand and are willing to accept the consequences of what they do, and do not expect us to do it for them.
For your reference, here are links to all the relevant fine print:
Most of our members are individuals, which makes it easy for them to figure out who they're signing up as. However, if you're signing up for any kind of organization in which you're not the sole participant, it pays to plan ahead. In these cases, we allow what's called a "role membership."
The primary difference between a personal membership and a role membership is that the former refers to a person, and the latter refers to a job. This difference is made manifest through the membership's contact email address. For example, a personal membership might be "John Smith
In either case, we require that things still come down to one single person at any given time who has final authority over the membership, and who exercises that authority by controlling the role email address. (Reminder: email is trivially forged, so we assign responsibility based on who can receive email at a given address, not who can send email purporting to be from that address.)
We recommend that role membership email contact addresses be managed using forwarding. In the example above, you might configure webmaster@example.com to forward to john.smith@example.com. Then, if John Smith hands the responsibility over to Bill Jones, just change webmaster@example.com to forward to bill.jones@example.com instead. For archival/recovery purposes, it's often best if the forwarded messages are copied to the original address, so that Bill can go into the webmaster mailbox if need be and see what John did in the past.
These guidelines will help you create a sustainable membership for an organization that can cleanly transition from one webmaster to another. If you don't follow them and you get into trouble, we either won't be able to help you, or we'll have to charge for the time we have to spend investigating and unraveling the problem, and you'll likely have to provide extensive documentation justifying your access to the account. Neither option is appealing to anyone.
Please also keep in mind that you must be an authorized representative of an organization in order to create its role membership. Specifically, you cannot do this to create memberships for others or to bypass our requirement that memberships are non-transferable. In the case of a role membership transition, only the point of contact is changed, the membership itself remains held by the organization.
This is a question only you can answer. Sites are billed based on the resources they consume (currently, bandwidth and storage). The cost is therefore based on the size and popularity of your site, as well as any optional features of our service that it uses (like domain registration or MySQL).
We don't know either of those things about your site, and we are not able to estimate things about your site that you don't know yourself. If you have your own estimates or past records about your site's size and popularity, you can use those, plus the pricing information available on our site, to estimate the approximate cost.
We do provide a Pricing Estimator you can use to try to get an idea of how much your hosting may cost.
Our latest cluster nodes are commodity 8-core Xeon servers with 32gb of RAM, but keep in mind that we offer shared hosting and we allocate sites to servers based on resources used, not N sites per machine. We use a variety of advanced techniques to ensure that each site gets pretty much the same baseline and enough headroom to burst without affecting others, regardless of the specific hardware type, so running on a certain machine type also doesn't imply that the entire resources of that machine will be available to a single site.
It depends. (Of course.) The short answer is: Not only don't we know, we can't know. The long answer uses the word "however" a lot.
Shared hosting has a well-earned reputation for volatility, due to the fact that you are sharing resources with other people and neither you nor we know from moment to moment what they or the visitors to their site are going to do. However, the most common causes of downtime for member sites are specific to the particular site affected (misconfigured DNS, an expired domain, runaway scripts, letting your prepaid account run out of funds, etc).
We find that when people ask us about uptime, they are expecting us to give them a magic number with a certain quantity of nines in it that represents what fraction of the time our service is available. However, our service is sufficiently varied and complex that offering such a number would be disingenuous, especially since we host a large number of sites and they don't all move in lock-step; one person's downtime might not affect someone else.
It would be very easy (and blatantly dishonest) for us to pick a an arbitrary metric that would allow us to claim 100% uptime, or any number of nines we want. But, likewise, for any sufficiently large cluster of computers, something somewhere is always offline for maintenance, so we could probably make an argument for 0% uptime. (Though we won't.) Sites move back and forth, servers go up and down, and most of it happens without any visible effect. Even when a production server crashes (which does happen from time to time) it typically affects only a relatively small percentage over our members' sites, and usually only for a few minutes.
Our clustered approach does provide resiliency against many (but not all) types of hardware and load problems that cause downtimes at providers where your site is 100% dependent on the availability of a specific server. However, we do develop and maintain our own clustering software, so occasionally something incredibly weird may happen here that never would have or could have happened anywhere else. Such events are rare, but not without precedent.
Sites hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET are probably slightly more likely to be "collateral damage" of a denial-of-service attack targeting some other controversial site hosted here than at other hosting companies that are less flexible in terms of hosted content. However, the flip side is that you are probably better protected against most such attacks due to our extensive experience with them, leading to (most likely) a very small net difference in the chance of being affected by that type of downtime.
All in all, our overall service availability is probably above average to very good when compared to other shared hosting providers. However, "overall availability" is meaningless to someone who's affected by something that doesn't affect everyone. Each person's view of our service availability can and will vary widely based on their personal experience as well as their personal criteria for what constitutes "availability."
We do monitor all of our systems and services continuously from multiple offsite locations and respond to problems detected as quickly as possible, 24x365.
We provide a web form that can help you recover your login and password, provided your member contact email address works and you know what it is. This form, is, however, time sensitive. It can only be used once per week in order to prevent attempts to "grief" members by constantly resetting their information. If you need a password reset and it's been less than one week since you created your membership or previously used the reset facility, please send email to support@nearlyfreespeech.net from your member contact email address and we'll be happy to check things out and reset your password.
If you lose your login, member password, and access to your email address all at the same time, you're in a bad place. Obviously you should never let that happen. However, we recognize that, for various reasons, it sometimes does, and we have established standard practices for recovering access to a membership when it does.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of "I lost all my information, please make an exception to your security practices and let me in" requests we receive come from people trying to gain illicit access to someone else's membership, and because NearlyFreeSpeech.NET takes the security and privacy of our members' services very seriously, the burden of proof that legitimate membership holders who have lost their information will have to meet to differentiate themselves from these would-be scammers is be extremely high.
Our standard practices for membership recovery verification vary somewhat depending on the circumstances, but typically involve three parts: a best-effort attempt to verify the identity of the requester using standard identity documents, an attempt to verify the request using the contact information we already have, and supplemental questions about the membership requiring information that only the member should have. The process will be time-consuming and slow; it can frequently take a week or more. To initiate it, contact us by email.
We believe all of our members know that we are serious about protecting their privacy and security; we believe that's at least part of the reason a lot of them pick us. We believe that they expect us to live up to that in situations such as these so that when they emerge from it, they can be supremely confident that their membership can't be hijacked by the first person who comes along with a good story. Consequently, we automatically construe any attempt to convince us to make an exception to our standard practices as an attempt by an unauthorized party to social engineer illicit access. This includes threats, sob stories, and everything in between.
No.
We encounter a variety of situations where people contact us claiming to be the rightful owner of a web site or domain managed through our service. Such claims are typically accompanied by demands to allow the person to take over, transfer services, or take something down.
Our policies are extremely strict and are designed to provide maximum security to our members. At NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, the person or entity we have on record as the holder of a membership is the only person authorized to direct us to take any action related to services we provide under that membership.
This puts people wanting access to a membership into two categories:
First, our members. Occasionally, a member will mislay their login credentials and be unable to access the system. We are able and happy to assist with a variety of such matters; they have their own FAQ entry with the specifics.
Second, everyone else. This includes customers, vendors, employees, employers, contractors, co-workers, relatives, and friends of members, not just the general public. We apologize, but we are not able to assist you under any circumstances, unless expressly authorized to do so in advance by the relevant member, and even then only under a very limited set of circumstances (such as allowing a predesignated party to make deposits or renew domains in case of emergency). Any concern or conflict you have with the member hosting the services with us, including problems contacting them, must be resolved directly with that member or via channels other than us. There are absolutely no exceptions.
We apologize to anyone negatively affected by our hardline stance on protecting the privacy and security of our members. While this often seems harsh to people already having some other major problem not caused by this policy, we ask them to please keep in mind the absolute chaos that would result if we handed over web sites and domains to anyone who asked for them via email based on their say-so. Thank you for your understanding.