Paysite Success
Lesson #08 
Choosing The Right Web Host
Written By Titmowse
To open a paysite, you must have a reliable place to host it. Not only should you take cost into account, you should look very seriously at their customer service quality. Anyone can write sales copy promising the finest technology and most responsive technical support. You have to look deeper into your potential, new host and see beyond the promotional text.
There are ways to suss out the good hosts from the not so good. One of the best is the recommendations of your fellow adult site owners. Ask around on an adult webmaster message board about paid hosting. Remember though that some of the recommendations you will get in response to your query will be folks who own or work for hosting companies. Of course, they will speak glowingly of their service. Look to those that pay for hosting and try to get the opinions of site owners who have been in the business for a good while.
There are a few things you should take into consideration with your paid host. For instance, many hosts will give you different rate packages depending on your needs. You have to figure out what your needs are. Here is a list of terms you should learn that will help you find a host:
Any file, HTML page or image a visitor downloads from your site to their computer is a transfer from your pay server to your customer. Hosts charge by transfer rates usually in Gigabit increments. If you have a large amount of customers and shoppers accessing your paysite, the transfer rate can be quite high. Remember how large you once thought a
1-gigabit hard drive was and how quickly it took you to fill it with programs and files and images? If you have 500 Megs of content on your site, it takes a handful of visitors to transfer 1 gigabit to their machines.
Bandwidth is a measurement of how fast data is delivered from a server. The more complicated the data, the more bandwidth is used. Images and movies use more bandwidth than say text. Your pay host should be run on a server that can handle the bandwidth of your traffic. If too many people are transferring data for your host's bandwidth capabilities, your site will crash. You need to make sure your host's server will be able to give you the bandwidth you want.
When we refer to a virtual server, we mean that your site is hosted on the machine of another company and shared by other site owners who pay for virtual hosting. You can access and configure aspects of your paysite by logging into your user account and you can upload files through an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. Many sites exist quite nicely on a Virtual Server but they are usually smaller or newer sites. This is definitely the right choice when starting out.
A dedicated server is a computer that is configured as a web server and is used exclusively by you, the site owner. You can lease a dedicated server from a host or you can pay to have your own server installed at the host's location, which is known as Co-Location. A dedicated server insures that you will not be sharing the same bandwidth as other site owners. Larger paysite and paysite network owners prefer a dedicated server. They can run you anywhere from $100 and up per month depending on your needs.
There are many different brands of software to run a web server. Everyone has their own personal preference because of programming capabilities, ease of use and whether or not the software is moderately safe from hackers. Some server software brands are BSD/Apache, Windows NT and Linux.
Of course, you should also make sure your paid host is adult friendly. Whereas most hosts see the money that comes from porn to be just as green as a non-adult site, some will not do business with a smut peddler. You can find a complete lists of hosts that cater to the adult market here:
There are other things to take into account when looking for a paid host such as whether or not you can have multiple domains, the quality of traffic statistics and helpful customer service and tech support. Every host has their own way of operating and you may like your host's bandwidth abilities, but not their tech support. You might like a host's prices but might prefer another one that has better server software.
As stated previously, if you are just starting out with a paysite, you may want to test the waters with virtual host to see just what you are getting yourself into. A phone call to the offices of a host will get you the information you need and will also tell you whether or not their customer service and tech support is good enough for you. A poll of your fellow adult webmasters will give you an even truer view of pay hosting. Ask them what they think and listen carefully, this is your future.
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Adult Webmasterism
