Lesson #03 Hosting Your Galleries
Written By Titmowse

Obviously a gallery page does no good without webspace to serve it from.

The question for the gallery maker is where? Are you better served by having a gallery on a paid hosting account or on a free-host?

A gallery page should work for you. It should be used to either sell sponsor memberships or convince surfers to visit your main site. Good listings on TGPs will send thousands of visitors to your gallery page. The more surfers that visit your gallery, the more likely you will be to sell to them. The purpose of a gallery is to bring you traffic.

Traffic means bandwidth. Someone has to pay for the cost of all those surfers visiting your gallery. The truth of the matter is that someone is you.

If you have a gallery on your own domain, (with your own paid-for hosting) you will be the one who has to pay for the cost of bandwidth/transfer. You have to pay for the space to store your images and HTML pages. A good day of TGP listing can send literally a hundred thousand unique hits to your gallery. If the amount of sign-ups your generate from that listing adds up to less than hosting transfer costs, you've lost money.

At one time, webmasters could turn to free adult hosting. Literally thousands of them would get an account on a free host just so they could use that account for galleries. Naturally, there was a trade-off, but it was an even trade. The free host would embed their ads at the top of every free-hosted page and the webmaster would accept the loss of traffic to those ads.

Somewhere along the line the free hosts got greedy. They began to redirect the pages of their webmasters. They began to pull nastier tricks like forcing auto-downloads of dialers and spyware. TGPs stopped accepting galleries submitted from free hosts and that brings us to today.

If you want to make money from galleries, you have to register your own domain and pay for your own hosting. There’s really no way around this fact.

Fortunately, the cost of hosting is cheaper than it’s ever been. You can open an account on a virtual host for as little as ten dollars a month. Mind you, a small $10.00 account isn’t going to give you much transfer but you can always upgrade to a heftier allowance.

Look for a complete database of adult web hosts in our Cozy Academy Library!