I am looking for any feedback on people who have used nearlyfreespeech. I have a site i want to host there with roughly a 1 gig database and 400 to 500 active users.

Moved by VM

Comments

polluxmr2’s picture

no one has used NSF?

silverwing’s picture

I don't recall ever hearing of them. (Here's the link for those interested: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ )

While their pricing policy is unique (https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing), on a database intensive site you may be better off with a company that has fixed pricing in place.

(Or set up a test site there and check them out.)

~silverwing

polluxmr2’s picture

looks like i will have to setup a test site and see what happens. i will report back what i find.

i have a few friends who have wordpress sites on there and they don't have any problems with performance.

seanray’s picture

This looks like a company with interesting service terms there - some billing criteria haven't been indicated clearly, you might want to know the limitation in CPU, Memory, and MySQL (and how they calculate the disk space usage of your MySQL).

Good to have a test before you put a business critical site there.

polluxmr2’s picture

This is an update.

I moved a dev site to them just to test the waters and was rather unimpressed.

There is no limit on CPU and MySQL storage. However, you do pay per day for all other storage. for my particular install plus modules, it worked out to a penny a day. HOWEVER, there IS a limit on memory; 32 megs. For my particular setup, that was no where near enough. on my home dev server, i had to set the php mem limit to 512m to get everything to work. you can purchase a higher memory limit but that does get expensive quick. ( side note, i am looking into why i need such a high memory limit. )

in short, if i had a static site or very simple drupal setup, nearly free speech would probably work. performance qas so-so. If i had to give it a grade, it would be a C+. everything else in dealing with them was good.

alan evans’s picture

I've tried a few sites on NFS and I probably would recommend looking for alternatives, but they do work out very cheap (typically $2 or so per month).

The RAM limit is not actually a problem on most basic D7 sites surprisingly (you can have several large modules enabled, but not too many), but the main problem I see is the fastCGI PHP they're using. I've checked a site with devel, and their MySQL seems fast enough (although this would depend on who else is using your shared MySQL instance and how hard), but the page execution time is shockingly bad - the queries all go through fast enough (usually less than 200ms total), but total page execution time is usually over 4 sec or so, sometimes worse.

You have no way of running cron, so you'll need to rely on the automated system cron built into D7.

You have no PHP opcode cache.

The best recommendation I'd have is cache everything on your site heavily, use boost module if you can.

You might also need to patch file.inc to get uploads working correctly due to the safe mode restrictions.

Drush doesn't work well.

In short, not very drupal-friendly, but dirt cheap. You actually are getting good value for money, but it is really, really cheap so don't expect too much performance.

polluxmr2’s picture

i use them for very simple installs for non-profits who have very little budget and very little in the way of needs/requirements. if you are using drupal as a "my first webpage" for someone or some organization where core is the only requirement, they are adequate. for anything outside of that, they aren't that friendly.

that being said, i have 3 sites there now and they seem to be working just fine. costs around 3 pennies a day to host them, or there about.

ieatcornbread’s picture

I use NFS and think it is great! I use it for simple websites. I have not used it for a drupal site yet. I Highly recommend NFS for simple sites.