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There's no doubt that I've been spoiled by my hosting experiences here in adult.

Sure there have been one or two total disasters and I still remember two separate occasions some years back, when upload speed was a lot less than it is today, that Steve and I sat up all night uploading our sites to a new host because the old ones had suddenly disappeared. But overall my hosting experiences here in adult have been very positive.

Not everyone has the same positive experiences and a bad experience with hosting can literally destroy your business. So if you're a newcomer to the adult online business then let me offer you a few suggestions about hosting so that you don't make the mistakes that so many newcomers make.

There are dangers in cheap
Obviously when you are first starting out in this business you're trying to keep your costs to a minimum. Even when you've been in this industry for years you want to keep your costs down as much as you can. But when it comes to hosting looking for a cheap deal can be dangerous.

All too often the hosting businesses out there that are offering very cheap deals are people who are resellers. A reseller buys or rents a server or two from a bigger hosting company and then resells space on those servers.

Resellers are almost never in the same place as their servers so if something goes wrong their response time can be very slow. And by 'very slow' I mean that it can take them hours to respond to a problem.

It's only common sense that if someone is offering a really cheap deal on hosting then they're cutting back on their costs in other places and technical support is one of those places. Sure, they may have a 24/7 contact number but you just might find that the person you're talking to is in a call centre a long way from the problem.

24/7 support is vital
When you're starting out always look for hosts who offer genuine 24/7 support. From my years of experience I can tell you that problems always arise at 3am on a Sunday morning just when you've got a TGP listing on The Hun so you need someone on-site to fix the problem quickly.

Of course you will pay for that support but ultimately you're going to be spending a little extra to save a lot in the future.

Don't be tempted to host with a mainstream host
There are some mainstream hosts out there that seem to offer incredible deals for hosting but don't put your sites on their servers. Most of them will have a clause buried somewhere in their terms of service that prohibits the use of their service for adult content and even if they do allow adult content their support is usually well below what you can get from a genuine adult host.

You will also find that their servers are often very slow because they cram as many sites onto their servers as they can without any thought for download speed. Here in adult you need to be on a fast server that can start displaying your sites on your surfers' computers within three seconds or you'll lose them.

Make sure you back up your sites
When you place your websites on a host's server it is your responsibility to maintain those sites. The host maintains the equipment but it's up to you to make sure that your sites are functioning correctly.

Many hosts offer their clients a backup service but usually those backup files are kept on the server where your site is so if something goes wrong then and the files on the server are corrupted you've lost everything. The best thing you can do is to do your own backups and keep those backups offline.

We keep a mirror image of every site we have and those files are stored offline. We also backup all our major databases every 24 hours and those files are stored offline too. If you're using WordPress for your sites then look for the wp-db-backup plugin and make sure you install it on every WordPress site you have.

That plugin will copy your WordPress databases every hour, day or week and email the copy to you. Databases are probably the single most common point of failure in a website so make sure you keep current copies of the database so you can recover quickly.

And there you have a few of my suggestions when it comes to hosting. If you get your hosting right you have a far better chance of succeeding here than you will have if your hosting is always causing your problems. So be sure to get your hosting right.