Do not use free space on non-adult hosting services like Tripod, Xoom, Geocities... If you do it (and I did it) at the beginning it's fine, you create your pages, upload some pictures ( and it can take some time ) you test it and it work ok. Good, then you want to generate some hits on it, so the easiest way to do it is to post only one picture to the newsgroup that deals the best with your subject of interest (alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.high-heels for me). You start getting hits: 10, 50, 500 and as people download your pictures it generates bandwidth activity. But these free hosting services have automatic systems that monitor the activity they will notice your site (because extensive download of pictures generate a lot more activity that just a text only home page about your dog). So, they check the content of your page and you receive a short email telling you that your account have been erased....

In general when starting a site you should not invest any money, just use a free hosting that allow adult content, later on you will be able to afford a real host. You can find lists with free adult hosting in every adult webmaster resource site. They don’t do it for free so they put automatically banners in every pages of your site, but overall it is a very good deal especially when you are starting…

2. Now it's time to choose a pay host

After a while, you should really consider a proper hosting solution, at least for the entrance of your site, and the member area, some AVS systems do not allow ads in the member area so you need a pay host, and that's where the troubles begins... There is different kinds of hosting services and if you have ever looked at the YNOT listing of adult hosting companies you will know that it’s quite a headache to figure out what the different offers are all about.

Nevertheless choosing a good hosting solution is fundamental and if you are serious about it you need to pay between 10 and 50 USD a month to get a good package. In this business you only gets what you pay for, and it's especially true for hosting solutions. Here are the key elements to be aware of:

You need 100% uptime, if your host is down for a few days, you will loose sales that are much more than the few USD rebate you got with your cheap host. If you want to do some CGI, be very careful sometimes it can be a nightmare to configure on some hosts, sometimes the tech guys dont' even know how to set up CGI, or the OS is simply not supported on the 200-300 USD script you have just purchased (I am speaking about NT there). You need to have someone to speak to, who understand a bit what he his doing... and who is not always away or replies to your mail 2 weeks later. What are the rules if you go over the contractual limit of your plan ? Do they have a stats programs (an essential tool) ? How much does it cost if you want to host another domain ? Will they bill a one time fee or a monthly charge for that ? If you are a bit concerned about performances issues do a server check using an online service. You also need to consider the startup costs because if you realize you made the wrong choice and have already payed 100 USD or 200 USD for setup cost the decision to switch will not be as easy as if you have not payed any setup fees…

The best way to proceed is to ask for references, try to speak to someone hosted with the company, ask questions like 'what is the path to sendmail' if you got no answer, you can forget about setting up a CGI script. Try not to get caught by additional services you can setup/provide yourself, for example if you choose an host that offers a free complex CGI script as part of it's package (probably an expensive one) you're in a potential trouble because after a couple of months if you want to switch hosts, you will loose all the work done with that script...

To help you out compare you need to consider that 1 GB of bandwidth can cost between 1 and $5. When you look at hosting companies be mindful that 1,000 MB is 1 GB. If they give you 1,000 MB a month (that is 33 MB a day), compare it to some plans that gives 1,000 MB a day. You also want to watch out for hosting companies that tell you after your usage you will pay 10 cents a MB for everything over, that comes out to $100 a GB. Also watch for sites that give you a lot of storage and low bandwidth usage, additional storage is cheaper, a lot cheaper, than bandwidth.

3. Here are the main kind of hosting packages available

Throttled bandwidth package: one benefit of using "bandwidth throttling" for our websites is that it’s possible to accurately limit the bandwidth available to each website and by doing so, it’s possible to accurately assign network bandwidth to serve these sites. If one web site becomes very busy, only that website will see performance problems due to bandwidth shortage. All other websites will perform just as they did before, since those other websites bandwidth is "reserved" and can not be touched by other websites. This sounds very good but the problem with that is: ok a fixed 64Kbit/sec of guaranteed bandwidth is equivalent in peak usage to 21.04 GB/month but because you do not use the maximum bandwidth all the time you will not consume 21 GB so you need to take that into account when comparing pricing. Also when you will get a lot of traffic at the end of the day for example you may not be able to serve everybody and delay will be introduce to your sites to reduce the bandwidth consumption. A real advantage is that the servers will always be very fast because every sites are restricted in advance. Some sites will clearly told you about throttled aspect other will not so clearly mention it. Just ask me if you want to know more about them.

Unlimited bandwidth package: unlimited package are not unlimited… In fact they often restrict the kind of sites to low bandwidth usage sites, free sites are sometimes not allowed, for example. Usually they can allow for up to 1 GB a day of transfer, and a certain CPU activity level but it’s ok because most sites, especially when starting will not use that bandwidth they offer a good solution when you start.

Monthly bandwidth usage: choosing this option you will only be charged for the bandwidth you use. Once you decide on a plan that suits your needs you don't jump to the next level if you go over it. Usually a flat rate is charge per GB for everything over your monthly usage until you reach the price of the next level. this in a monthly usage, not daily. At the end of the month you pay for your total monthly usage. This package leaves your sites room to accept any traffic you can generate, the problem with that is the bandwidth stealer and/or anybody hotlinking you member area. Once a Russian TGP has put my member area in free access, you can imagine the activity 100's of people getting access to my 50 MB pictures. It did generate about 10 GB in few days... But fortunately I saw it on my logs, and I used a .htaccess file to protect the area.

Daily bandwidth usage: you should be very careful when using this kind of hosting, here is how they work: they log your bandwidth activity for each day of the month, they remove a fraction of the highest days (for example 10%) in order to get a fair picture and you are billed based on the highest bandwidth traffic generated. I personally find this option very dangerous because you can have an average traffic of 0.5-1 GB a day, and if you post on a few high traffic thumb posts you will go from 3 to 4 GB a day during 4-5 days. Because of the pricing structure you will end up paying 500 USD instead of 100 USD (in fact you dont’ have a real control).

Dedicated servers: this is a good option for very high traffic web sites, but the costs associated with it can be quite high.

4. Reseller or direct ISP providers

You need also to be aware that many hosting companies allow you to resell parts of your account therefore you can find very similar offers with different prices…in fact they came from the same primary resellers and they do not monitor themselves their systems.

5. Bandwidth theft

Bandwidth theft is a problem on adult websites. Some dishonest webmasters will link your images on their web pages. To a normal surf it appears that the image is being served from the dishonest webmasters site, instead the image is being served from your site (using your bandwidth). Therefore if you suspect that someone is linking to your site you should rename the directories where you have your images in (and fix the links to those images in your html documents). If you do this and immediately see a drop in the bandwidth used by your site, there is a good chance that some unscrupulous webmaster has been stealing your bandwidth (and your images). So ask your ISP if they have any ways to protect your site from this "bandwidth theft" problem. The best solution is to add a .htaccess file in your member area.

6. Checking the performances of your host

Given the wide choice of hosts choosing a good hosting solution can be quite difficult... So a performance check can help you make up your mind. Net Mechanic offers free checks of your hosts. Go there and chose the check server option, they will monitor your server during 8 hours and they will send you a detailed report.