"While digital images and HTML documents might not be as tangible as donuts or dirt bikes, it still costs real money to store and serve those little bits of data."

NOTE: In this first of two articles, I’m going to give you information and insights about two types of PAID web hosting. For an article concerning FREE adult hosts, I suggest you read Part One of our “Zero Down Plan” series.

When you decide to operate an adult website, there are some elements that are absolutely necessary. You must have content. You must have that content coded into HTML documents. You must have a domain name. You must have web hosting.

Online content seems ethereal until it comes time to pay the bandwidth bill. While digital images and HTML documents might not be as tangible as donuts or dirt bikes, it still costs real money to store and serve those little bits of data. As an adult webmaster, you want to be sure you pay for the type of hosting which best fits your needs. Those two types of paid web hosting are called VIRTUAL and DEDICATED.

VIRTUAL HOSTING

Like so many IT terms, VIRTUAL Hosting means something a little different than the actual words imply. The hosting is quite real. The VIRTUAL part applies to the shared attributes of your hosting account. In fact, VIRTUAL hosting is also referred to as SHARED hosting.

To understand VIRTUAL hosting, you need to know about web servers. A web server is a computer specially hardwired to store and serve documents for retrieval through the World Wide Web. While it’s possible to turn a PC into a web server, the average PC simply isn’t built to handle even small amounts of Internet traffic. The job of storing files and images and hosting web sites is best done with a server.

Web servers cost a lot of money to harbor and operate. Most website operators pay for hosting through a provider instead of buying a server. That provider usually owns many web servers. As a client, you pay for space on one of those servers.

When you get a VIRTUAL hosting account, you’re paying to share one physical server with several other clients. A web server is usually only big enough to handle one large site or many little sites. If you are new to paid hosting or have a small adult site, then you’ll probably get a VIRTUAL hosting account.

VIRTUAL hosting is best for small and new adult webmasters for various reasons. The main reason is money. VIRTUAL hosting costs less than DEDICATED hosting. Some providers charge less than ten dollars a month for beginner/junior VIRTUAL hosting packages.

With a beginner package you can expect to receive around 100-200 Megs of server space for storing your content and HTML documents. The average full-size static image should be no more than 100 KB in size and there are 1000 kilobytes in a megabyte. At 150 megabytes of storage, you could easily house hundreds of images with room to spare for HTML documents and other website minutia.

In addition to storage a VIRTUAL hosting package includes a certain amount of TRANSFER. TRANSFER is traffic multiplied by download. In other words, if your whole adult site (images, banners, decorative graphics, HTML documents, etc.) is 50 megabytes in size, then each time one visitor views your entire domain, they’ll have burned up 50 megabytes of transfer. So, if you’ve got a beginner VIRTUAL account with 2 gigabytes of transfer, it would only take 40 users to eat up all your transfer allotment. That is, if every single user opens each and every one of your pages and images.

In reality, as a freshman to hosting, your adult site probably won’t be 50 megabytes large. In reality, most of your visitors won’t open each and every file stored on your VIRTUAL web server. In reality, your first pay-hosted site will be about 10 megabytes large and you’ll be doing your best to get your surfers off your site so they can visit the servers of your adult sponsor.

A VIRTUAL account offers advantages for the small, rookie webmaster and presents disadvantages to the popular site operator. With VIRTUAL hosting a greenhorn can get his/her feet wet without drowning financially. Yet with VIRTUAL hosting, the expanding site operator is introduced to the limits of a shared server. For starters, it’s best to go VIRTUAL. It’s cheaper. It’s easier to set up. In fact, VIRTUAL hosting is less expensive than ever before.

For links to paid hosting providers who are adult friendly, there’s no better place to look than the Hosting Services section on Cozy Frog's Resource listings.

** Click Here For: Virtual or Dedicated? Part #2