Unfortunately not all paid hosts are worth using and choosing the right host can be very difficult. When you arrive at their website there is no way that most adult webmasters can tell if the business is well established or not. All hosting companies want to give you the impression that they are well established and can offer wonderful technical support 24/7 and many of the sites leave you with the impression that you are dealing with a very big business.
Unfortunately while that is true of some there are many hosts whose business consists of nothing more than a single server that you would be sharing with numerous other people and their 24/7 tech support consists of one person who may or may not even be in the same locality as the server. Even the smallest adult site needs hosting that offers genuine 24/7/365 technical support. When your site goes down at 3am on a Sunday morning you want the problem fixed immediately, not at 8am on Monday morning.
Another important point that you must be aware of is that not all hosts are prepared to accept adult sites onto their servers. Adult sites can place a heavy burden on a host’s resources and not everyone is prepared to handle such high traffic sites. Most hosts will clearly indicate whether or not they accept adult sites in their terms of service so always check the TOS and if in doubt contact the host and make it clear that the sites that they would be hosting for you are adult oriented.
You will see that most hosts offer a wide range of plans that are based on the amount of bandwidth you might use in a month. For most newbies a plan that offers 5gig of transfer in a month is adequate but this will depend on the type of sites that you want to build. We will talk more about that later but until then here are some more points to think about as you choose your host.
- Make sure that you fully understand the terminology that you will be faced with before you even hit the hosting link over on Porn Resource to shop for a host. Terms such as virtual hosting, disk space and overages and the costs involved are of vital importance to you and you need to understand why you may need Front Page extensions (I hope you have enough sense not to use Front Page) and why a plan with CGI, PHP, online stats and raw logs may be better than one without. Make sure you know the difference between a Unix and an NT server and which is better for your situation.
- Do not be influenced by price alone, if you want to spend peanuts then all you are going to get are monkeys. Good quality service comes at a price and hosting is the absolute foundation of your online business. On the other hand don’t spend too much, there are some very high quality hosts out there who give great service at a very reasonable price.
- Make yourself a short list of likely hosting companies and then start asking for opinions from other webmasters. Everyone has had problems with hosts at one time or another and webmasters have very long memories when it comes to hosting so you will get plenty of input on good and bad hosts. Be sure to listen to what you are told, and if an experienced webmaster suggests one thing and a flock of newbies suggest something else then listen to the guy with the experience.
- When you have talked to other webmasters about those hosting companies that are on your short list its time to contact the hosting companies direct and talk to them. See if someone really does answer the phone, ask them to explain their hosting plans to you and make sure that you understand all the details of your plan.
Hosting is a vital part of you business, make sure you understand all the minute detail and how it will apply to you and when you have all that information in front of you make your decision and sign-up.
I use and recommend HawkHost. This is a very sound and reliable hosting provider, I use it for commercial sites however it is adult friendly as well. Good support and staff, more affordable than most, especially if you take advantage of their coupons specials, they honor them for a good duration. Their support is quite good and while they do not offer a lot of space with their basic shared plans, I overlook that for the up-time, support and options.