Do not use free space on Non Adult hosting services like Tripod, Xoom, Geocities... If you do it ( and I did it ) at the begining it's fine you create your pages, upload Mo of picts ( and it can take some time ) you test it and it work OK! Good then you whant to generate some hits on it, so the esyeast way to do it is to post only one pict to the news group that deals the best with your subject of interest (alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.high-heels for me ) You start gettinghits 10, 50, 500 and as people download your picts it generates bandwith activity. But these free hosting services have automatic systems that monitor the activity they will notice your site ( because extensive doawload of picts generate a lot more activity that just Text hompage about your dog !! ) They check the content of your page and you recive a little Email telling you that your account have been erased....

In general when starting a site you should not invest any $, use a free site hosting option, later on you will be able to afford a real host. The best solution I found so far is www.fsn.net they offer 20Mo of free disk space for your 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…
If you whant to consider another option you can check out the listing of Hosting solutions with the different webmaster resources sites list in main index section:

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 adds 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 headheck to figure out what the different offers are all about.

Nevertehless choosing a good hosting solution is fudamental and if you are serious about it you need to pay between 50 and 100 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 50 USD rebate you got with your cheap host.
If you whant to do some CGI, be very carefull sometimes it can be a nightmare to configure on some hosts, sometimes the 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, how much does it cost if you whant to host another domain, will they bill a one time fee or a monthly charge for that (if they do...it's not very nice...)
If you are a bit concern about performances issues do a server check using netmechanics services.
You also need to consider the startup costs because if you realise you made the wrong choice and have 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…
Do they have a free stats programs ( an essential tool )

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 seting up a CGI script...

Try not to get caught by additional services you can setup/provide yourself, for example if you choose a host that offers a free complex CGI script as part of it's package (probably an expensive one) your in potential trouble because after a couple of months if you whant to switch hosts, you will loose all the work done with the CGI...

To help you out compare you need to consider that 1 G of bandwith can cost between 3 to 10$.
When you look at other hosting companies be mindful that 1000 megs is 1 gig.. and if they give you 1000 megs a month that is 33 megs a day compared to some plans that gives 1000 megs a day. You also want to watch out for hosting companies that tell you after your usage you will pay .10 a meg for everything over, that comes out to $100.00 a gig. Also watch for sites that give you a llot of storage and low bandwith usage, additional storage is cheaper a lot cheaper than bandwidth.

Every ISP speaks of OC3, OC12, T1, T3… and you may not realy understand what all that stands for…
I strongly suggest you to have a look at UUNET services
(they are the people who provide all this accesses)
http://www.uunet.com/lang.en/products/access/matrix.html

Here are the main kind of hosting packages available

throttled bandwith 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 website 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 21.04GB/month but because you do not use the maximum bandwith all the time you will not consume 21 G 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 bandwith 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 whant to know more about them.

Unlimited bandwith package

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

Monthly bandwith 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 reate is charge per gig 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 bandwith stealer and/or anybody hotlinking you member area.
Once a russian TGP has poted my member area in free access, you can imagine the activity 100's of people getting access to my 50 Mo pics. It did generate about 10 Go in 5 days...
But fortunatly I saw it on my logs, and I used a .htaccess file to protect the area.

Daily bandwith usage

You should be very carefull when using this kind of hosting, here is how they work :
They log your bandwith 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 bandwith
traffic generated.

I personnaly find this option very dangerous because you can have an average traffic of 0.5-1 G a day,
and if you post on a few high traffic thumb posts you will go to 3 to 4 G 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 websites, but the costst associated with it can be quite high.

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 when in fact 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 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.

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 primery resellers and they do not monitor themself their systems.

.htaccess file to protect your member area

.htaccess is a protection system used on UNIX systems, you simply create a text file like this one name it .htaccess the ( . is important ) and uploade it to your member area as an ascii file.
(just test it after in case...)

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://id.adultcheck.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.sexykingdome.com
RewriteRule /* http://sexykingdome.com [R,L]

Here the .htaccess files protects the directory where it was uploaded from every links except links comming from id.adultcheck.com and www.sexykingdome.com

Checking the Performances of your Host

Given the wide choice of hosts chosing a good hosting solution can be quite difficult...

So a performance check can help you make up your mind. Netmechanic offers Free checks

of your hosts.

Go here:www.netmechanic.com and chose the check server option, they will monitor your server during 8 hours and send you a report.

This tips section have been provided by
Latex Cash

If you have any question Email us at:
superb1000@hotmail.com