I’m interested in hearing what companies you use for hosting? Has anyone used cloud bases services like AWS, Google or Digital Ocean?
I use TSS (Total Server Solutions, formerly NatNet). I would NOT recommend them. I’m with them because they offer a level of DDOS protection (at a price I can afford) that others either don’t offer or charge an absurd amount for (during a DDOS attack my traffic gets routed through a 3rd party facilty that filters the traffic and sends it on to my server. There’s slightly more latency, but users are generally unaware there’s an attack going on.) And my pricing for that is particularly good because I was a guinea pig for NatNet when they first contracted with the 3rd party vendor for that service.
But generally TSS is a bit of a nightmare. Nothing happens quickly. You always get incompetent, off-shore support staff doing the initial response, and at least 80% of the time they don’t understand the question or get the response wrong. Eventually you’ll get to an American tech who knows his stuff and is great, but he’ll be overworked and may not get back to you quickly.
MojoHost is who almost everyone seems to recommend for adult. They seem like really wonderful people who honestly care about their business and are 110% adult friendly (they show up at the trade shows, etc.). I keep wanting to change to them, but get hung up on the DDOS issue â they don’t offer a level of DDOS protection that I’m comfortable with. Basically their own techs will try to mitigate the attack. Which means you’ll be down (or have degraded performance) for hours, possibly days, if you’re attacked.
Last I knew cloud services will be double or triple the cost of some place like TSS or Mojo. And they’re basically bare bones servers. They’re not “fully managed” (AFAIK). Damian @ PPV Networks went with AWS a few years ago. You might hit him up to ask his opinion. I get the sense he likes the technical challenge and likes being “cutting edge”. Personally, I’d rather keep things simple. I’m not in the business of managing servers and don’t want to be.
Another one you might want to consider is Competent Hosting. It was started in the past year by a few of the guys from NatNet who left after TSS took over. Given their small size basically your ticket will always get handled by a senior tech. If you wanted someone to manage a cloud service, they’d probably be up for that as well. Given what I understand of your relationship with Gossamer â you might be able to have a similar relationship with these guys.
And it’s not a bad moment to mention that if you’re using a CDN, a properly configured server that uses HTTP/2 can usually outperform a CDN. The CDN will only do (slightly) better on heavily trafficked pages.
CDN77 for CDN
Joe’s Data Center. Very good configurations and excellent support, but they don’t offer managed servers.
Thank you very much for all the feedback. Especially about TSS… I won’t touch them, sounds like my worst nightmare.
MojoHost I’ll have to have a look at. I’m currently looking at Google Cloud and Digital Ocean (DO has been mentioned by a few adult sites). I don’t dare to touch AWS, they are over-complicated… My problem is that we have quite specialised requirements.
Gossamer Host who I’ve used for many years was good but expensive, however they recently got bought by someone else and a venture capital firm based in the US… the end result is that they are not getting rid of all the adult sites they hosted. I’m guessing the US Venture Capitalists are you standard rightwing conservatives. Unfortunately the guys at Gossmaer had been told nothing would change and business as usual but as soon as the deal was signed it all changed.
I use UK Cheap Hosts. I know just the name might give a certain impression but I have to say that they’ve been amazing for the last few years since moving things from Arvixe. Our most popular blog is hosted with them and while there are limits we’ve exceeded a few times they always expand our service to meet that demand, and with minor increase in costs. They don’t offer everything, but the support is spectacular. Whenever I’ve needed to raise a ticket the guy gets back to us within two hours, even at weekends, and he’s usually fixed whatever it was when he does.
If all you need is a good, affordable host for something like a blog or a forum, I would gladly recommend them.
Yes the name is a bit off putting 
I wouldn’t ever want to host in the UK though and my needs are a bit more complex and very large bandwidth requirements.
Last night one of the techs asked me (I’m paraphrasing) if I’d like to keep the configuration of my FULLY MANAGED server so it will crash all the time.
That’s the level of support you can expect from TSS.
wow…
This is what I like the least about working in adult. We are often stuck with second rate service because the top tier don’t work with porn sites. And that goes not just for hosts but all other services from banks, designers to everything else.
Yeah, I’m really tempted to switch to Competent or Mojo and just cross my fingers that I won’t have another DDOS attack. I mean I haven’t had one in a lot of years.
But with the bad support I’m now pretty ruthless with them and just openly ridicule them and demand they escalate the ticket to someone who’s competent.
I looked at Mojo but they are not exactly cutting edge… quite behind and offers old technology. Digital Ocean looks interesting to me.
Pretty much I fully manage AWS myself for my personal projects and also for my employer. Used Digital Ocean before, but I’ve moved everything over to AWS because of their vast offering of different products that I use such as App Sync. I do use Google for some projects that use Firebase for Real Time DB. Also, with AWS, you can spin up a RDS for MySQL instead of having to install it on your box. Oh and S3 bucket for image and videos.
AWS also has https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ for those who are not comfortable with full cloud management on their own.
interesting. And this is for your adult sites as well?
I would like to use Google or AWD however my biggest concern is if it’s ok to use for adult content.
AWS is 100% ok for adult… Google Cloud, when I spoke to a rep there assured me adult was fine but neither me or anyone I have worked for has tried it yet… but for AWS they certainly dont care…
Digital Ocean I must admit I don’t know much about, although their costs do seem to be a little cheaper than AWS/GoogleCloud depending on the project and what you use!
Thank you, that’s helpful to know.
Last I checked they do. I’ve shutdown all my adult stuff last year so all of my current stuff are all non adult, and my employer is a non adult company and a subsidiary of a fortune 500 company and we are happy with it. As Jay mentioned above another site already hosts their stuff on AWS.
At Gamma/Buddyprofits, we’ve been slowly moving our infrastructure from our data center(colocation) to AWS.
AWS really gives us a ton of flexibility to try new things without having to come up with upfront requirements for infrastructure deployments. Cloud service costs can get out of control fast if you don’t optimize and aren’t careful. But paying computation/data by usage really can help reduce costs, since you don’t need to overprovision your infrastructure for peek usage. This is especially true when you have volatile workloads like video encoding and big data processing that don’t happen constantly.
Thank you, that’s good to hear. Gives me more confidence to try Google if AWS can do adult.
Mojohost for all the big stuff, and then DigitalOcean for side-projects (before becoming big).