I've been using NFSN for quite sometime for a few lean sites. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a site at a very low cost and has some technical knowledg

I've been using NFSN for quite sometime for a few lean sites. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a site at a very low cost and has some technical knowledge. If you're tech savvy, value freedom, privacy, etc., then NFSN should be a service you should look at for cheap shared hosting. My biggest cost is the domain name renewal by a huge margin. The cost of storage, bandwidth and resource use amount to so tiny a figure that I always think about the other shared hosts (which are usually oversold) where most people pay a lot more than what they use. I also use the free tier of CloudFlare in front of the NSFN sites, and that has made my site costs (minus domain fees) negligible (like a few dollars a year - yes, a year). Of course, my needs are small, but I believe this would work well for most people who want a site that's not run by some other company selling ads on their content. Since the costs are usually very low, it also has an amusing side effect where members start counting pennies literally and try to optimize it further (I've indulged in that too)!!! The owner/admin, jdw, is a no-nonsense person who's quite helpful. Reading his comments and views on the FAQ, in the feature voting system and on the forums provides a lot of insight about NFSN and can also be a nice learning experience on many topics - technical, freedom, policy, political and others. There are three main downsides that I have noticed, which may make using NFSN a bit more frustrating for some people: 1. You have to have at least some technical knowledge if you want to install anything for dynamic websites. Otherwise you'd struggle since there's nothing like cPanel or any other interface that allows one-click installation of popular web applications. 2. There is a feature voting system where one can propose new additions and have other members can vote and comment on. But you'd find many voted features just sitting around for several years with no action on them, even those that look quite simple. On its part, NFSN is quite clear in stating that these may never be implemented and that it may take up only those that are cheaper and easier to do and maintain. And there are many feature requests that have been completed. But it's difficult to accept that some simple ones aren't done for a very long time. 3. Paid support could be a relatively bigger drain on your expenses if you do need it. Again, NFSN does not believe in users cross-subsidizing each other and tries its best to put actual costs (or close) on the user requiring something. But this may come as a surprise for users.