What is your ideal webhosting provider like?
 

I'm planning to expand my (IT) company's services with webhosting.

Having a track record in the adult business, I came up with the idea that it might make sense to target the needs of this specific industry directly.

I'm thinking about two different type of services:

1) High performance shared hosting for smaller sites
2) Infrastructure-as-a-service for bigger ones, who need extra stuff like load balancing, CDN, multi location failover, etc.

Both solutions would be cloud based.

So here comes the question: what do you miss from your current web host's offering? Do you have any specific needs or services? Does your chosen company take care of these? What services / features would make you switch providers?

Thanks!

It would look a lot like National Net.

Or Certified Hosting!

Thanks for the tips!

Why are these companies so good? What do they do better than the rest?

It would not look like Webair. From today:


Time: Tue Nov 25 10:05:59 EST 2014
Total Time on Error: 14 minutes, 10 seconds

Time: Tue Nov 25 13:30:24 EST 2014
Total Time on Error: 13 minutes, 4 seconds

Time: Tue Nov 25 16:59:38 EST 2014
Total Time on Error: 12 minutes, 53 seconds

IMO adult webhosting is the same as non-adult webhosting... I never understood that...
But that's just me.

I'm working with mojo hosting for a friend/client and... like the others what he wants is just GOOD support/managed.

:2 cents:

I agree adult and non webhosting should be considered the same. No need to discriminate.

I am pretty happy with Hawkhost

Thank you for the feedback so far!

Let me elaborate the adult / non-adult webhosting a bit further.

There are certain challenges in adult website hosting: they generally deal with much higher traffic than most "general" websites, which is the reason why most adult websites are sooner or later get kicked out from shared hosting plans, and "forced" to buy dedicated server / VPS packages. Due to high traffic they also eat up a ton of bandwidth as well, something that is, if not optimized, can be quite pricy for both the owner and the provider.

Another issue I see is that a lot of the widely used scripts are quite old (5-10+ years), so to run them the hosting provider needs to run older versions of the environment, something that is both a performance and security challenge.

And we are only scratching the surface here. Wouldn't it be nice if your hosting provider could connect you, or even help you to integrate with payment providers who actually do adult, or if they would offer services like click-tracking, bot detection, and things like that? Just a few examples.

The two primary factors for me, are stellar support and as affordable a price as possible, without affecting the support part.

In terms of support I also expect, in addition to fixing the mundane stuff that may arise, competence to customize my server environment to my needs. I.e. scripts that may, as you're saying, be outdated. They should be able to patch holes in old packages, in order to minimize security issues as much as possible, if not eliminate them completely.

Additionally, I expect my host to set up things in such ways that my content, both static and dynamic, is served extremely fast to any geo demographics. This is in order to increase the chances of my visitors sticking around and looking at whatever offers I throw their way, while they browse through my sites and the content served.

I should also be able to upgrade/downgrade/move to a different server seamlessly, according to how my needs change.

I expect full management, in order to further eliminate holes in various control panel softwares. Some things, like adding a domain or creating a db, I could probably do in less than a minute myself in a control panel. While it may take a couple more for the host to do the same. But anything more complex than that would require more time for me to do it, so the host gets to take care of that. Not to mention that not using a control panel usually means a faster server, if you have a big load of traffic.

Mind you, all the above applies to dedicated servers. I have tons of shared accounts across 15 hosts or so as well, but the sites I have on those are not critical at all. I just use them for backlinking my money sites.

My host offers all of the above, as well as any extras I may need. They also install scripts for me, when needed (trading scripts, TGP/tube scripts, CMS's, you name it), set up crons for them when applicable and make sure everything runs smoothly.

I've had dedicated servers with this host, XXXHostIt.com, for 11 years, since 2003. They've always bent over backwards to make sure everything runs the way it should. I've sent lots of people their way over the years and none of them had any complaints and never moved elsewhere. As I said, STELLAR support. They'll also beat pretty much all the "reputable" hosts' pricing, so that's always a plus.

Anyway, if anyone may be interested in giving them a whirl, hit me up and I'll put you in touch directly with the owner so you can haggle. :1orglaugh

To be cheap as fuck.