We've been using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN) for several years now. They provide an excellent service at a very low cost. Of course, they're not appropriate for everyone, but for small/micro businesses and personal websites, which make up the bulk of our portfolio, they're just perfect.
Their pay-what-you-use pricing meant that we had extremely low hosting costs until recently. In December of 2017, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET introduced a new pricing model. The new model raised the charges significantly if you had many small, static websites, with a fixed charge of $0.05 per site per day.
In an effort to keep costs down for ourselves and our customers, we looked into alternatives, but were reluctant to migrate all the websites to other hosting providers. Luckily, there's a way to combine multiple websites into one NFSN "site" and thus only pay the fixed charges for one site.
Using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET's "per-alias site/document root" option meant that we could use (and pay for) just one "site" for hosting many of our clients' websites. The process is simple but not very well documented. Still, the lack of clear instructions shouldn't be a problem for anyone familiar with the basics of hosting a website on NFSN.
Here are the instructions, in 4 simple steps:
1. Turn on "per-alias document root" option on your main NFSN site. Create a subfolder for each of your websites in your /public_html. The name of the subfolder must correspond with each website's domain name. You can use symbolic links to have both versions of the URL - with and without "www." - or simply create two subfolders.
2. Upload the websites' content into coresponding subfolders. This also means moving the content from /public_html into a subfolder.
3. Now would be a good time to backup everything related to those websites. Because now you remove all those NFSN sites whose content you just uploaded into subfolders. Removing the sites from NearlyFreeSpeech.NET means that all their content will be deleted, so be prepared.
4. In the main site's NFSN control panel add aliases for each of those websites. The alias for each website should be the same as the name of the subfolder and the domain name. If you're using both "www." and bare domain names, add them both as aliases.
Optional: 5. If you're using NFSN as a DNS and domain service, there's no need to do anything else. NFSN's system will automatically add appropriate DNS records for each alias you added in step 4. If not, then you need to add a CNAME record to each website's DNS info, with a redirect to the main NFSN's site domain which you're using to host all the other websites - the websites' domains should be redirected to "ABC.nsfhost.com" where "ABC" is your NFSN site.
And that's it! All your websites hosted on one NearlyFreeSpeech.NET site, courtesy of per-alias document root!
If you get stuck at any point, we'd be glad to help. Contact us at for more information.