At this moment in time, I pay to host six websites. Five of those sites are hosted at one company. The sixth is hosted at another. With the five sites, I care about them and I would be sad if anything happened to them. But the sixth - the one hosted at another provider - is my precious baby. I love that site. I work on it every day. I am always doing something to that site. I am always monitoring its performance and traffic. I'm always tweaking the layout, testing new sponsors and updating content. If anything goes wrong with my favorite site, I want it fixed and I won't rest until I am satisfied. That's why my sixth site is on a different hosting account. A really really good host with the very best tech support I could find.
"The thing we
want the most, the thing that matters most, the most desirable quality of any web provider, we want superior tech support." |
The fact is, there's a number of fine adult-friendly pay hosts, ready to put your site up and keep it up. Most of these web providers offer great values and feature-rich packages. The majority of web hosts promise 24 hour tech support, easy setup and minimal downtime. Some of these are huge companies, hosting hundreds of thousands of sites. Others fall in the mid-size range. Some hosts are very small. All of them advertise their client benefits and all of them want you as a customer. Your job is to look past the sales copy, marketing vows, and find out if your host has the right stuff.
We all want massive storage and transfer for little money. We want to our databases and scripts to work. We want decent server statistics. We want our sites to always be online and we want them to load as fast as lightning. But the thing we want the most, the thing that matters most, the most desirable quality of any web provider, we want superior tech support.
When your site goes down, you want it back up as soon as humanly possible, no matter what time of day or night. There's many reasons why a site will go offline or show up as "not found". The problem could be your mistake or it could be a problem with your host.
The point is, when your site is offline, you're not making any money. When your site is messed up, you're not getting any traffic and you take the risk of losing trades. When those galleries that you managed to get listed on the TGPs start to come up empty, you gamble with your standing as a TGP webmaster. To you, this situation is a crisis. You want a web host with tech support that takes your site as seriously as you do.
Sadly, some webmasters discover their host's true mettle only after a crisis happens. These poor pornmeisters wait until something goes wrong and then are angered when they discover the support desk is either unreachable, unhelpful or both. These folks find out the hard way, their support crew is really more of an answering service than actual technicians. These foolish webmasters suffer a lot of needless grief because they didn't research their host's tech support before they paid for an account.
How does a webmaster research a hosting company's tech support? Here's a few tips:
Is the Support/Help page easy to find? When you open the Support/Help page, what sort of information is listed there? Is there a FAQ? How about email contact addresses? Does the host provide a live-support chat? How about a phone number? Can you call this host on the telephone? If the host provides all of these things in an easy-to-locate/use format, that's a good sign.
Ask your webmaster buddies on your IM list. Ask in adult webmaster forums like Cozy Campus. Tell the board members what kind of hosting package you're looking for or ask them their opinions on a certain host that catches your fancy. If a host company rep replies in your thread, try to measure their response with a grain of salt. Look for real responses from real webmasters when polling for an opinion on hosting.
Ask Your Intended Host Directly.
Send them an inquiry email or try to make contact with support staff that list their ICQ on a help page. See how quickly they respond to you, if at all. Better yet, get on the telephone and speak with your host one-to-one. Try to see if you can get through to their tech support staff so you can know for sure whether that staff is going to suit your needs.
I told you about my five sites on one host and the sixth on another for a reason. That sixth site is on another host because it went down when it was on the same host as my other five. My five-site host is a huge company and I found out how huge when they erased my sixth site during a server upgrade. It took me an hour on hold before I was sent from phone bank to phone bank only to discover, my site was gone and there was nothing they would do about it. They didn't know me from Adam and I realized that my sixth site deserved better. My good host has amazing tech support. If I call, they always answer.
They know me and they know my account. They tell me exactly what's up and what they're going to do and I love them.
Find a host with tech support you can love. Trust me, you'll never regret it.
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