A friend of mine suggested I try hosting with www.nearlyfreespeech.net for my website -- because instead of a set monthly rate, they charge you based on usage. Low traffic sites (like mine) would cost very little to maintain. About that time, I was starting a private website, so I gave it a go. As it turns out, I'm quite happy.

Don't get me wrong, about the same time I signed up, Nearly Free Speech had some MAJOR routing and DNS issues. My site was offline or horribly slow for over a week. Then, they had a major MySQL crash, and my site was offline for another half a day. Since that time, several months ago, it's been great. I'm OK with a company having problems as long as they fix it, and communicate the problem with their clients. NFS did both.

Plus, they're DIRT CHEAP!!! I started the account with about $10 in the "bank", and only today did I feel a need to add more money. Not because it was low, but because I am adding another website to the account and I want to make sure it's "spike proof". See, if a website gets Dugg or Slashdotted, their servers happily scale for you -- but you pay for the bandwidth such a spike generates. It seems very fair to me.

So if you've been looking for a really inexpensive way to reliably host a website, especially if it doesn't get much traffic or store much data -- Nearly Free Speech might be a good choice. I'm happy with it. When my hosting package is done at GoDaddy, I'll be switching my personal site over too.
__________________________
Shawn Powers is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal. You might find him chatting on the IRC channel, or Twitter