Sometimes I don’t know if I live in the same world as other people.

Lately, I‘ve been spending time at a non-adult message board. It’s a fairly large community comprised of supposedly enlightened grownups. I realize that not everyone on the Interwebs is a geek but some of these folk are plain clueless when it comes to how web works. I’m kind of amazed at the amount of people, willing to shell out ten bucks a month for some crappy image hosting service. I am astounded how many “savvy” surfers can’t discern between a virus and spyware. I am confounded when I observe their utter ignorance about Internet porn. Oh, they know where to find it, but most of them don’t know the first thing about how it’s made or hosted or sold.

"There is simply no reason to put off opening a hosting account. Actually, there might be a couple. One would be that you are very poor and you don't have a bank account. The second is if you live in a fascist country with no Internet freedom. Other than those two, no reason. Zero. Zip Nada."

Take hosting. There’s this very nice lady at the mainstream board that has collected some interesting documents. She’s a bright woman but she’s totally afraid of HTML. So she allows another board member to store her documents on his hosting account. No big thing. Except this other member has informed the lady that his host wants to raise his fee to $1000.00 a month. I know this other member. His site has some Flash animations but there’s no way in hell his site generates enough traffic to justify $1000.00 a month. What’s worse, he’s telling the lady that downloads of her documents are why he is suffering overage charges. The woman’s documents combined, total 257 Kilobytes.

Somebody’s getting ripped off and I’m not sure who but it sure ain’t this guy’s crappy host. Get this. The dude’s host is a reseller! A reseller!

Oh, if only I could lead all these innocent people to the dark side. But I can’t. If those suckers knew how cheap it is to open a small hosting account, with plenty of storage, bandwidth, software support and security, well, they probably wouldn’t take my advice anyway. The web hosts I’m talking about serve porn. The enlightened, pseudo-savvy folks I encounter in the mainstream think that a web server actually knows the difference between an image file of a kitty versus one of a pussy. Oh well, lucky for us.

There is simply no reason to put off opening a hosting account. Actually, there might be a couple. One would be that you are very poor and you don’t have a bank account. The second is if you live in a fascist country with no Internet freedom. Other than those two, no reason. Zero. Zip Nada.

What is stopping you? Is it price? Is it fear?

PRICE

Oh my god! Where have you been? Bandwidth is cheeeeeeep! Storage is awesome! Transfer allowances are getting better every day! This ain’t the days of $50.00 a Gig. For the moment, those days are history! I won’t go into specific rates but as an example, I have one site that I pay $20.00 a month for. I’ve got all the basic benefits like email, it’s PHP and CGI enabled, plus some other stuff I’m never going to use. The reason I pay $20.00 per month as opposed to $5.00 is because that’s the site where I generate a lot of traffic. When I get a gallery listed or the site is added to a popular top list, I don't have overages. I pay extra for the higher transfer. My site holds up well to a good traffic day where I might receive a hundred thousand uniques. There are more expensive hosting packages and there are cheaper ones. The point being is that almost anybody can afford five bucks a month.

FEAR

Are you afraid because you don’t know a thing about web hosting? Well, stop that right now. Web hosting is easier than easy! In fact, most decent hosts post Helpful FAQs and support tutorials on their sites to guide you. The really good hosts respond quickly to support tickets and the excellent hosts are just a phone call away. There’s no great skill involved in logging onto your account and pointing your domain to the right server. Then all you really need to know is how to ftp, which stands for File Transfer Protocol. You just upload the files of your website to the ftp server of your host and voila! Your site is online! It’s not hard. You can do it.

If you want to be an adult webmaster, you absolutely positively, have to register a domain and pay for hosting. Free hosts are out. Image and file-hosting sites are a joke. You need a real website host. You need the freedom to post adult content without judgement. You need a company that isn’t going to rip you off. You need a host that is prepared for the threats that come from hackers, script kiddies and spammers. You need an adult host for your adult site.

Adult hosting is a bargain. To locate and browse great adult hosts, visit our Hosting Listings at Cozy Frog. Also, check out our Hosting Helper Guide for the lowdown on choosing your website home.