Web Hosting Today

Reseller hosting means that not only can you find great web hosting for your site(s), but you can also provide it for others as an extra source of income. Web hosting reseller programs let you act as middleman (or woman) between existing web hosting providers and new clients that you find for them. Income is derived in the form of commissions paid directly by the provider and/or profits based on reselling discounted packages at a higher price.

Web hosting companies that offer a web host reseller program find it to be an extremely popular tool for them to market and sell their services to new clients in untapped markets with minimal overhead. As a participant in a web hosting reseller program, you would be a hot commodity to these companies, who will often compete to obtain your reseller hosting services almost more than they might to get new clients. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense; one client is just one client, but any one person doing reseller hosting represents limitless new clients.

The benefit to setting up a reseller hosting service, rather than, say, running your own server and starting a web hosting services from scratch, is that you get the support and resources of an established firm. You get to sell and possibly manage a small portion of an already successful enterprise rather than having to scrimp and save, sweat and toil to insert a new player onto an already inundated field of competitors.

There are a number of ways you can sell web space on another company’s server:

You can act as the web host’s agent, similar to other affiliate marketing programs where a link from your sites and advertisements may take the potential customers directly to the company’s own site, or the customer may simply mention you to the provider as their referrer. Either way, the customer would purchase service directly from the web hosting company, and you would then get a percentage.

But besides merely marketing another host’s services, you might also choose to personally sell their services directly to the clients. All future contact would then take place directly between the web hosting company and the customer, but because you did not only the marketing but the actual selling, your cut would be greater.

Or you could act as the host yourself, marketing, selling, and then managing the web space that you provide, having purchased it from the actual provider for a discounted price. It would appear to the customer as though you actually owned your own web hosting company, rather than just being an affiliate in a web host reseller program, though your hosting services would actually be a “skin” of the parent company. In this scenario and the following one, customers would call you for support rather than the provider itself.

Alternately, you could buy a bunch of web space and bandwidth yourself and parse it out as you see fit to provide whatever packages you wish to your customers. This, probably the most comprehensive reseller hosting program, offers you maximum control over your business and potentially the greatest returns, but it also requires significantly more attention, responsibility, and risk.

If you do decide to explore the wonderful world of reseller hosting, you’ll want to figure out which services to offer. You could offer store fronts, search engine optimization tools, dedicated server accounts, domain names, and on and on. While you definitely want to offer your customer as much in one place as they might need - as most customers won’t want to purchase their packages a la carte from a handful of web hosting (and reseller hosting) companies if they can avoid it - you also don’t want to overextend yourself. It’s advisable to consider specializing your services to a degree, especially if you’re just one person. Decide who your target market is, where specifically you’ll be advertising to find them, and what the predominant needs of those clients might be, and then cater your reseller hosting packages to their specific needs.

Whichever method of reseller hosting you choose, if you do it right, you can host your own websites for next to nothing.

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Adult web hosting is not without its inherent risks. In fact, probably the most significant issue one should consider before embarking on an adult hosting enterprise is the law. It’s crucial you be aware of the possibilities before deciding to get into the adult web hosting business.

Laws on adult web hosting vary from locality to locality, which is a big problem with an internet enterprise that, by its very nature, is global. The most you, as webmaster can do, is make every good faith effort to stay within the confines of the law. This means avoiding content that can be considered obscene or harmful to minors - quite a tall undertaking when you consider the diverse and disparate reactions people have to pornography.

What is even meant by obscene? Quite a large number of people consider adult web hosting in general obscene. They find any form of pornography objectionable. And while that’s not what’s meant by “obscene” as used above, if an angry parent is determined to press charges against you because their 12 year old son snuck a peek at the girl on girl action on your website, you’ll still need the protection of a good lawyer to get you off the hook - and even then there’s no guarantee.

So, the word “obscene” in the context of adult web hosting refers to things like child pornography, bestiality, rape, and incest. Now you’ll see plenty of sites claiming that they contain scenes of “rape” and “incest”. 99 times out of 100, these are fake, play-acted scenes. If they are real, the webmaster is signing up for a whole world of trouble. Don’t you follow their lead just to get the extra flow of cash from any of those niche markets.

There is a popular test for determining, according to the law, the obscenity of a site (or a magazine, etc.). According to this test, called the “Miller Test”, if your product (your site) when taken as a whole is considered without any artistic, literary, scientific, or cultural merit according to the mores of the local community, it is considered obscene. By including non-adult content in your adult site (just like adult magazines that have articles on politics, cars, etc.), you significantly reduce your risk of having an obscenity charge stick.

For all webmasters, of adult hosting sites or otherwise, legal statute 18 U.S.C. § 2257 states that records must be kept of documents proving legal age verification for every model depicted on the site in a sexual explicit manner. You must hire no models under the age of 18, nor can you hire any models over the age of 18 if you can’t obtain copies for your records of documents proving such. This also means you should use no stock footage either without having first verified the age of any models depicted. Just because a jpeg appears on one adult website, do not assume that its webmasters did their due diligence.

The best way to start an adult website is with your own personal lawyer on board to walk you through the sticky legal steps. While a lawyer can help you avoid the legal pitfalls and reduce your risk of prosecution, there are no guarantees in the adult web hosting industry and you need to be aware of that from the beginning.

You will need to have on your site, a “Warning Page”, a start page that site visitors come to first before getting to view any of your adult content. The Warning Page can be as simple as a disclaimer against a plain background stating that your site contains adult material and should not be viewed by anyone under 21 years of age. It should also mention that if, perchance, viewing such material is illegal in the visitor’s area, then they must not enter your site.

The Warning Page does not relieve you of the responsibility of keeping minors from viewing your adult material. It merely shows a good faith effort on your part to keep them away. Nonetheless, you could still get prosecuted, and your Warning Page alone would make for an extremely weak defense.

You must also use some sort of Age Verification System (AVS) as a gateway for visitors to enter your site. Though it is far from perfect, the concept behind an AVS is that if someone has a credit card in their name, there is a good chance that cardholder is at least over 18 years old. You see how flimsy this argument really is. Therefore, an AVS, while an absolute necessity in an adult web hosting environment, is no real protection against a minor entering your site anyway.

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edicated hosting is a smart choice if you have determined that you need an entire server and Internet connection specifically reserved for your business activity. Shared servers may be cheaper and less of a commitment than dedicated hosting, but these advantages will quickly fade in comparison to the problems you might experience. Without a dedicated host, you could have problems with speed, reliability, and the ability to customize your web site environment.

Speed: Server response times in a shared hosting environment depend highly on the activity of the other sites your company is sharing with. Dedicated web hosting enables you to better control your server response times and more efficiently manage any related issues that arise.

Reliability: With a dedicated hosting environment, you have unlimited access to the operating system, software applications, and database applications. This allows you a reliable way to meet the needs of your customers - it’s all there when you need it. A dedicated server can also provide better security for your site, shielding you from the problems that can develop when others are using the same server.

Customization: As your company grows, your web site will have to keep up with it. The dedicated hosting option allows you to adapt your applications, increase bandwidth, and upgrade your hard drive as needed.

Dedicated hosting is available with Unix, Windows, and Mac based servers. Take time to look closely at the various companies out there that offer dedicated hosting.

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Colocation hosting provides you (and your business) the bandwidth of a large business with a cost only slightly greater than that of a standard, basic web hosting package. With colocation hosting, you buy your own server and lug it down to the actual data center’s office and install it in their “rack” of servers.

Rather than sharing a company’s server(s), or even renting a dedicated server from the same data center, with colocation hosting you actually own the hardware, while still enjoying the many resources of a large, established data center. Such benefits include: controlled air temperature and humidity, building security (from fire, flood, theft, etc.), redundancy, backup systems, and the support of the company’s IT and management team on hand. But you alone are responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of your server; the colocation hosting provider only handles things like connectivity, environmental factors, uninterruptible power, and security.

To many programmers, though, this is ideal, allowing the flexibility to determine what software and what hardware you will be using, with the peace of mind of knowing certain crucial (and expensive) elements of web hosting are still being taken care of for you

Colocation is really all about control: you control the extra services you can offer your clients that a regular hosting package (even with a dedicated server) might not allow, such as a VPN, colocated server space, or a dedicated server; you control what components are added/subtracted and when; you control how much bandwidth (within a certain range) each of your servers gets, rather than a fixed percentage of your overall bandwidth allotment; you control your own router, firewall, and VLAN.

A colocation hosting provider, as with other web hosting providers, can either be a standalone outfit (in this case, a data center), a third-party company that rents server space from a data center, or a colocation web hosting reseller.

The cost of a colocation hosting package is usually determined first by the amount of rack space your server or servers take up. Rack space is measured based on a rack unit (1U) of 1.75 inches in height. If you use a tower server, it will cost even more to colocate it. It may be worth your while to invest in servers that conform to measurement in rack units.

Besides rack space, you will also pay for bandwidth and for any extra services your colocation hosting provider may offer. Another cost you will need to incur with colocation hosting is insurance for your hardware, or “server insurance”.

Once you’ve purchased your server and ready to deliver it or having it delivered to the collocation hosting provider’s site, take every precaution you can to protect your equipment, because that is the crux here - it is your equipment. Chances are you’ll probably even go ahead and preconfigure your server before sending it off, which is only greater incentive for taking care. You’ll probably get the most peace of mind bringing the server to the site yourself, but if for any reason you can’t, be sure to pack it as securely as you possibly can, and to take out insurance on it from your postal carrier.

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