NearlyFreeSpeech web hosting – Pay for what you use

You know those prepaid calling cards that you can buy at varying rates? Using those cards you purchase talk time on credit and use it to make calls until you run out of credit, after which you purchase more credit. There are no monthly bills and you pay only for what you use. NearlyFreeSpeech is that kind of a web hosting provider, and the only one that I know of.

NearlyFreeSpeech’s unique pricing model makes it the most cost effective solution for low traffic website. With NearlyFreeSpeech (NFS) you can start hosting your site for as little as $0.25! 

Unlike other web hosting services, NFS does not charge a fixed monthly fee or provides it’s customers a fixed quota of disk space and bandwidth – you pay for what you actually use. You deposit a minimum amount of fee (which starts at incredibly low $0.25) and charges for the amount of bandwidth and storage space your site actually use are automatically debited from your personal bandwidth account as they are incurred, one penny at a time.

Data Transfers (Bandwidth) – Starts at $1.00 per gigabyte and goes down.
Disk Space (Storage) -  $0.01 per megabyte per month

The larger your site grows and the more bandwidth it uses, the cheaper it gets. So up to 1 GB you are charged $1 and for subsequent usage, you are charged less. The following is their complete price table:

You can use their bandwidth calculator to find out how much you have to pay for your site’s bandwidth usage.

If your site draws low traffic then there is no use in paying for 50 GB traffic and 5 GB disk space, which you usually have to do with other hosting services, when you aren’t going to use it anyway. With NFS you might have to pay only about a dollar or two each month or even less, as their member chart reveals.

However for a high traffic site, NFS can turn out to be very costly. For instance if your site uses 100 GB bandwidth each month you will pay up ending something like $30 a month.

NFS supports PHP 5, CGI, MySQL 5.0, SSH, SFTP, FTP and the like. They have reported problems with Cron jobs and does not support services like email servers, Shoutcast, video streaming servers etc.