“Monthly hosting for only $9.95!” How many times do you see what seems like an unbelievable deal, and get discouraged when you visit the site just to learn that you are only getting a meager amount of space, and barely any bandwidth? How about sites that say they offer unlimited features, requiring of course, special upgrades to over-priced accounts? What about following link after link running around in circles trying to find a host that will allow you to host adult files, and not just pictures, but movies and streaming audio as well? Once you do find a host that allows you to store these things, you will get shut down or overcharged because of something that you somehow managed to overlook in their “Acceptable Use Policy.”.”Monthly hosting for only $9.95!” How many times do you see what seems like an unbelievable deal, and get discouraged when you visit the site just to learn that you are only getting a meager amount of space, and barely any bandwidth? How about sites that say they offer unlimited features, requiring of course, special upgrades to over-priced accounts? What about following link after link running around in circles trying to find a host that will allow you to host adult files, and not just pictures, but movies and streaming audio as well? Once you do find a host that allows you to store these things, you will get shut down or overcharged because of something that you somehow managed to overlook in their “Acceptable Use Policy.”

Personally, I myself do not see the need for adult Web hosting to be so much more expensive when it is simply hosting. It seems that people love to give certain things labels so that they can charge more for those labels. Take a mainstream site that always teeters or skates on the First Amendment for freedom of speech and you can bet they have regular hosting prices! What is it about adult content that is any different and makes prices skyrocket for hosting? (If anyone knows the definitive answer to that question, please send it to me in an email.)

How about unlimited space / bandwidth? Have you ever been taken on that ride everyone would love to have? There are always a few reasons not to, though. Adult hosting is one of those reasons. On average out of the hosting companies that I have tested out, I have either been shut down, or charged 2-3 times as much from a hosting company that promises “Unlimited Bandwidth.” (If you want to know of one such hosting company that promises this, email me). Do not be fooled, there is no such thing as unlimited transfer (unlimband.com). Someone is flipping the bill somewhere along the lines, whether it’s the superior hosting company that promises it, or you, the customer.

Also, don’t be fooled if a hosting company does offer you unlimited bandwidth, because most hosting companies restrict their unlimited plans to a business that uses the majority of its bandwidth for emails, or a personal site that has virtually no traffic. I can attest to the fact that the majority of those hosting companies out there do not offer it to adult sites.

So… it’s time to choose a hosting company! When you choose an adult Web hosting company for the first time, the first question you have to ask yourself is: What kind of Web hosting account do I want? Adult Webmasters are typically presented with a few options – the ones that I will look at here are shared and dedicated hosting.

If you are just starting out or have a small adult company with a limited budget, most people recommend a shared account, which can be had for less than $50 a month with a fair amount of features built in. Almost all shared plans come with a Web-based administration utility that makes authoring your Web site a breeze. They can allow you to set up emails, auto responders, databases, check statistics – the list goes on. Some mistakes often made in choosing a cheap shared plan is that the adult Webmaster did not read the fine print and does not realize that he essentially has little to no control over what content the hosting company can host. Another mistake made would be not getting a package that you can grow with or one that can grow with you, in terms of space, size, speed, and transfer.

A downside to getting shared hosting is that your site is hosted with other sites. Several sites on the same shared host use a fair amount of memory and CPU utilization as well as bandwidth. So in all actuality, it could harm your site’s performance and slow it down to a crawl. The logical solution to solving the problem of having a slow site is usually by moving on to a dedicated server.

Dedicated servers are highly recommended for adult Webmasters who need a huge amount of transfer and space for their site, as well as for Webmasters who want full control over their servers. With most dedicated servers, you are typically able to choose from a number of operating systems, hardware additions and web server software packages to run your site on. Dedicated servers also tend to have more bandwidth than shared servers, as most Web hosting companies assume that if you need a dedicated server you have a pretty big business.

The downsides to getting dedicated servers are the cost factor – they aren’t cheap and you usually get what you pay for. The other downside to getting a dedicated server is they require a fair amount of technical expertise. Usually you are responsible for them, unless you pay for someone to take care of them for you, but of course that requires more money.

Having been fed up with all that I was unable to accomplish online with hosting companies, I started my own adult Web hosting business (http://www.devianthosting.com). While we do not offer unlimited space or bandwidth, we do offer excellent packages, rates, and we are scalable. Plus we are on one of the fastest networks in North America. I do not believe in overcharging for adult hosting because when I was starting my all-free adult sites I would always have to pay horrible rates for adult web hosting. I do believe in offering the best service possible while maintaining the best prices around. What have you got to lose, other than a free 30-day trial of our web hosting services?

Brandon has been in the Internet industry for seven years and owns http://www.devianthosting.com, an adult Web hosting company that provides wonderful service with fast servers for cheap prices.