A Brief Guide to Adult Hosting

Hosting might be one of the most important aspects of starting a new website. There are so many options on the market that it’s easy to get confused quickly. If you are planning to start an adult website, everything is even more complicated. You will come across a lot of companies that don’t prohibit adult content on their servers or even advertise as adult-friendly, but will shut down your website with the first complaint.

You can try your luck with popular companies such as BlueHost, SiteGround or HostGator, but if you want to be on the safe side, it’s best you choose an adult hosting company. However, there are still many options, and you need to pick only one of them.

In this article, we will try to help you by pointing out the most important thing you need to know about running an adult website and how to find a hosting provider that fits your needs.

Location

Location is an important thing to pay attention to when you have a website. You will want to choose a server that is located in a country that provides good connectivity and low latency to your target audience.

What matters when hosting an adult site is that you choose a country that has lenient policies towards adult content. Preferably, you should opt for an offshore location in a country that ignores DMCA requests. If you are in the adult business, it’s inevitable to get DMCA takedown notices.

Hosting companies in countries such as The Netherlands, Iceland and Switzerland don’t fall under the jurisdiction of US law, so it’s much harder for DMCA to perform a takedown. It’s no coincidence that the most popular adult hosting companies, such as Vicetemple, host their servers in the Netherlands.

Free hosting

You will also have to decide what hosting type you need—shared, VPS and dedicated servers are the three most common ones. Your decision about this should be mostly based on the type of adult website that you will be running and your expectations for that website.

You might want to save money and go for free hosting, but we strongly advise you against that. It comes with way too many disadvantages, and no reputable website will use that option. With free hosting, you won’t be able to have your separate domain extension and you will have to allow free advertisements on your websites. Your bandwidth and speed will be limited and you will receive no customer support.

Pros:

• Free
• Easy to use
• Good for beginners

Cons:

• Limited speed
• No customer support
• Unwanted advertisements that can’t be controlled

Now, with paid hosting, you won’t have to deal with any of this and you will enjoy much more freedom. So, let’s take a look at what some of the paid options can provide you with and what types of website are they best suited for.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most affordable hosting you can go for, but it comes with a price. Because multiple websites are shared on the same physical server, loading time is usually slow. This might be fine if you are running an adult blog, but if you have a tube site, you don’t want your customers to go elsewhere because the page is not loading fast enough. Another disadvantage of shared hosting is that you can easily get infected from the websites you share server with.

Webmasters that are just starting out and plan on having a smaller website such as adult blog or erotic fiction website can benefit from web hosting because those websites don’t require much space and bandwidth.

Pros:

• Cheap
• Good for first-time webmasters
• Requires no technical knowledge

Cons:

• Slow
• Prone to malwares
• Can’t handle high traffic
• Virtual private server

Virtual private server

Virtual private server (VPS) is a middle ground between shared hosting and dedicated servers. You will have more autonomy with it as you will have more resources than with shared plans, but you will still be sharing the hardware resources of the physical server. If you think your website will be steadily growing, this might be the best option for you, but beware that it can’t handle high spikes in traffic. Even though it’s not as cheap as shared hosting, VPS is still quite affordable.

If you plan on running a dating site, webcam site, escort site or adult forum, this is probably the best hosting type for you.

Pros:

• Autonomy
• Affordable
• More resources

Cons:

• Shared server
• Prone to malware
• Can’t handle spikes in traffic
• Dedicated servers

Dedicated servers

If you opt for a dedicated server, that means you will actually be renting a physical server that only you will use. It comes with a lot more resources than shared or VPS option and if plan to produce viral content, that is what you are going to need. When it comes to malwares, it is also the best option because there is no risk of getting infected because of a neighbor website. However, dedicated servers are much more expensive than the first two plans we mentioned.

Dedicated servers are required only when you plan to run a website with high traffic such as porn site or membership site or if you are running adult news or adult magazine and you expect high traffic surges.

Pros:

• Lots of resources
• Only you use the server
• Can handle traffic spikes

Cons:

• Expensive
• Requires technical knowledge
• Requires a lot of maintenance
• Technical specifications

Technical specifications

When running an adult website, there are a few technical specifications you need to pay close attention to. The first one is bandwidth and the second one is disk space.

You should never go for a bandwidth less than 100 GB because you don’t want your visitors to have an inadequate experience, or even worse, not be able to access your website at all. Bandwidth limitations shouldn’t be something that ruins your website.

If you are running an adult website, chances are you will rely heavily on images and videos to please your visitors. This is why you will need more disk space than an average website that mostly uses text. The content you have to store on a server will take up more space, so you shouldn't save on that.

No matter what specs you decide on in the beginning, make sure that your hosting provider offers flexible plans. You should be able to upgrade at any given time and the hosting company needs to provide you with that option.

Checklist:

• Bandwidth
• Disk space
• Flexibility
• Additional features

Additional features

Another thing you should pay attention to when choosing an adult hosting provider is the quality of customer support. If anything is ever wrong with your website, they will be the ones you need to contact first and you want them to be reliable and answer promptly. You don’t want your website to suffer because you can’t get a hold of your hosting provider’s customer service.

In addition to good customer service, they need to have good technical support. After you contact the customer service, somebody will need to take care of the technical issues that you are having. Good technical service will also help you maintain your website and make sure problems don’t occur often.

It’s good to find a hosting provider that offers you complementary services such as web design and website builders in addition to hosting. Adult hosting companies should also be able to provide you with themes and scripts no matter what adult niche you are in.

You should also make sure your hosting provider offers a money-back guarantee. That way you can try out their services and if you are unsatisfied, you will get your money back.

Checklist:

• Good customer service
• Themes and scripts
• Money-back guarantee
• Conclusion

Conclusion

Spending time researching hosting providers might seem like a hassle when you are just starting a website, but finding the right host is not something you should overlook. It’s a vital part of starting an adult website and it requires careful planning.

It will be much easier to run your website if you know you can rely on your hosting company to help you out and provide you with quality service.