Frequently Asked Questions

The NearlyFreeSpeech.NET FAQ (*)

General (*)

What's the most important thing to know about your service?

What's the most common mistake people make while signing up for NearlyFreeSpeech.NET?

Why do I have to enter my real/legal name when creating a membership?

Can I beat your pricing if I get my own VPS?

Do you provide email hosting services?

Is your service easy to use?

Do you provide DNS hosting services?

How many web sites can I host with a NearlyFreeSpeech.NET membership?

Do you register domain names?

How will I know if my account is about to run out of funds?

Why do you only offer prepaid service?

My web designer says I should use somebody else instead of you. What do you say?

Do you price-match your competitors?

How can you make money at these prices?

What is the minimum deposit?

Will you design my web site for me?

Do you offer collocation, dedicated servers, or VPS services?

What happens if I get slashdotted/reddited?

Are you about to pop up a "chat now with sales!" ad on me?

What if I want to set up a web site but don't have a domain name / don't want to fool with DNS?

Why don't you have a free tier?

What's the difference between bandwidth and storage?

Why doesn't your website look like other hosting provider sites?

Are your domain registration services intended for general-purpose usage?

What if my web site gets attacked?

Is your service only for controversial or extreme websites?

Should I set up my new small business website at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET?

Will you pre-approve my web site content or proposed use of your service?

How much will my site cost to host with you?

What kind of uptime can I expect with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET?

Is this cloud computing?

Where are you located?

Do you offer telephone support?

No. We provide support primarily through the ticket-based issue reporting system on our site and through our forums.

Providing good-quality telephone technical support is very difficult and expensive. Most of our members don't use support and, more importantly, don't want to pay for support they don't use. Maintaining a telephone support option for the few people who would use it is not economically feasible. We also have a moral objection to call centers; anyone who has ever seen, run, or interacted with one knows it's no way to treat human beings, regardless of which side of the phone they're on.

Most companies as small as ours that offer telephone support do so by outsourcing it. It's a very cost-effective approach, but the result is dreadful. It still involves call centers, and it fills them with people that have little to no knowledge about the specific system they're "supporting." When a call comes in, the name of the company they should pretend to represent pops up on the screen. Since they have no experience with that company, pretty much all they can do is search the FAQ and read entries to callers in the hopes that they find the right one. While that's adequate in a lot of cases, it wouldn't work here. Soul destruction aside, our members are smart, motivated and tend to have a lot of experience. If the information they need is in the FAQ, they're generally perfectly capable of finding it for themselves.

However, there are web-hosting companies that do a great job with telephone support, especially for new customers and people inexperienced with web-hosting. They're generally much larger ones that can afford to hire dedicated people and train them on the systems their customers use. If that's something you're looking for, you may find that one of those companies is a much better fit for your needs than we are. And although they may be considerably more expensive, the extra investment is often well worth it if that type of extensive assistance is something you expect to use frequently.

Someone else uses your service and wants my help with it. How do I help them?

Should I use NearlyFreeSpeech.NET or a VPS?