opinion

Hosting Talk: Scaling Back Without Compromising Quality

Budget-trimming has become a part of every business (adult and otherwise) in recent years, an inevitable reaction to sluggish sales that inspires business owners to cut spending, reduce costs and downscale their operations to lessen the financial impact of declining revenues. This process can be painful, as this belt-tightening often is aimed at the heart of the company: its staff.

Eager to avoid that kind of drastic move, many companies scale back on what they consider “extras,” or less essential spending — including scaling back on bandwidth and hosting costs. While this move might seem logical from the outside, it’s a huge mistake in the long run. There are ways to cut costs without cutting corners and getting by with service that “good enough.” Here are two common cut-backs, and what we recommend scaling back on instead:

There are tools and services available that allow you to monitor and reduce consumption without cutting into your site’s total available bandwidth and performance.

Cost Cut: Bandwidth

For video-heavy sites, premium bandwidth is mission critical and worth every penny. Your customers expect — and demand — quality performance: videos that play without buffering, downloads that don’t chug along, and page loads without delays. Discounted bandwidth is appealing for its low sticker price, but the consequences far outweigh the benefits: just one negative experience on your website and you’ve lost a customer. And unhappy members = poor membership retention = decreased revenue, which leads to more cost cutting — it’s the very definition of a “vicious cycle.”

Money Saver: Monitor Consumption

There are tools and services available that allow you to monitor and reduce consumption without cutting into your site’s total available bandwidth and performance. Your current hosting company may offer tools that allow you to see where your bandwidth is being burned, even letting you drilldown to the specific user and IP address, and identify members who are making the heaviest use of your sites. (And if your current host doesn’t offer this option, you can find useful software from outside sources.)

You may find members who are abusing their access, running download managers that pull down content in bulk as quickly as possible — in some cases with the intent of redistributing your content without permission for their own profit. ID these users and throttle their connection — or ban them outright.

Another tip: by monitoring user behavior, you may find that you can save money by changing the way you deliver content. If you find that most users watch only a few minutes of any given scene, but your current delivery method downloads the entire file each time they press “play,” you may want to explore a different streaming option. Adaptive bit rate, for example, streams in real time without downloads or buffering and can save an average of 50 percent of bandwidth use compared to traditional progressive download.

Cost Cut: Hosting

Because hosting isn’t a “visible” expense, it’s easy to consider reducing your program to be a harmless solution. Moving from a dedicated server to a shared plan sounds good on paper, but before you make the call, consider the consequences. Sharing server space costs less, yes, but if your website is your bread and butter, you risk dramatically affecting its performance to the point of profit loss.

Remember: you have less than 30 seconds to engage your viewer, and it takes only a few seconds of delays before he or she clicks away to the competition. Research by Google engineers (reported in the New York Times last year) shows that if your site is slower than a close competitor’s by more than 250 milliseconds, users will stop clicking your way. That’s faster than the blink of an eye. Switching to a cheaper hosting plan will simply slow your website speed and, in turn, risk losing customers to your competition. It’s just not worth it.

Money Saver: Conserve!

This may sound silly, but you’d be surprised at how much money you can save through simple adjustments in behavior and resource allocation at the office. Over time, even something as simple as setting your thermostat a few degrees cooler in the winter (or hotter in the summer) can save thousands of dollars every year, and the same goes for turning off lights and appliances overnight.

We also recommend making changes to your supply use, such as requiring paperless communication and document sharing until the final product is approved. Paper doesn’t come cheap — and it comes from trees, remember? — so implementing a document sharing program (or simply using Google Drive) has helped many of our clients considerably reduce paper, ink and printing costs. It also makes it easier to keep organized and make sure everyone signs off on the final result to avoid costly mistakes.

These cuts may seem insignificant, but they add up over time and save you money in ways that your customers won’t even notice. Because any changes that reduce your site’s performance will only result in further revenue loss, which defeats the purpose of those cuts in the first place.

Steven Daris is CEO and co-founder of Red Apple Media (RedAppleMedia.com), a managed hosting, ecommerce and video streaming solutions provider.

Related:  

Copyright © 2024 Adnet Media. All Rights Reserved. XBIZ is a trademark of Adnet Media.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited.

More Articles

profile

VerifyMy Seeks to Provide Frictionless Online Safety, Compliance Solutions

Before founding VerifyMy, Ryan Shaw was simply looking for an age verification solution for his previous business. The ones he found, however, were too expensive, too difficult to integrate with, or failed to take into account the needs of either the businesses implementing them or the end users who would be required to interact with them.

Alejandro Freixes ·
opinion

How Adult Website Operators Can Cash in on the 'Interchange' Class Action

The Payment Card Interchange Fee Settlement resulted from a landmark antitrust lawsuit involving Visa, Mastercard and several major banks. The case centered around the interchange fees charged to merchants for processing credit and debit card transactions. These fees are set by card networks and are paid by merchants to the banks that issue the cards.

Jonathan Corona ·
opinion

It's Time to Rock the Vote and Make Your Voice Heard

When I worked to defeat California’s Proposition 60 in 2016, our opposition campaign was outspent nearly 10 to 1. Nevertheless, our community came together and garnered enough support and awareness to defeat that harmful, misguided piece of proposed legislation — by more than a million votes.

Siouxsie Q ·
opinion

Staying Compliant to Avoid the Takedown Shakedown

Dealing with complaints is an everyday part of doing business — and a crucial one, since not dealing with them properly can haunt your business in multiple ways. Card brand regulations require every merchant doing business online to have in place a complaint process for reporting content that may be illegal or that violates the card brand rules.

Cathy Beardsley ·
profile

WIA Profile: Patricia Ucros

Born in Bogota, Colombia, Ucros graduated from college with a degree in education. She spent three years teaching third grade, which she enjoyed a lot, before heeding her father’s advice and moving to South Florida.

Women In Adult ·
opinion

Creating Payment Redundancies to Maximize Payout Uptime

During the global CrowdStrike outage that took place toward the end of July, a flawed software update brought air travel and electronic commerce to a grinding halt worldwide. This dramatically underscores the importance of having a backup plan in place for critical infrastructure.

Jonathan Corona ·
opinion

The Need for Minimal Friction in Age Verification Technology

In the adult sector, robust age assurance, comprised of age verification and age estimation methods, is critical to ensuring legal compliance with ever-evolving regulations, safeguarding minors from inappropriate content and protecting the privacy of adults wishing to view adult content.

Gavin Worrall ·
opinion

Account-to-Account Payments: The New Banking Disruptor?

So much of our industry relies upon Visa and Mastercard to support consumer payments — and with that reliance comes increased scrutiny by both brands. From a compliance perspective, the bar keeps getting raised until it feels like we end up spending half our time making sure we are compliant rather than growing our business.

Cathy Beardsley ·
profile

WIA Profile: Samantha Beatrice

Beatrice credits the sex positivity of Montreal for ultimately inspiring her to pursue work in adult entertainment. She had many friends working in the industry, from sex workers to production teams, so it felt like a natural fit and offered an opportunity to apply her marketing and social media savvy to support people she truly believes in and wants to see succeed.

Women In Adult ·
opinion

Understanding the Latest Server Processors

Over the last decade, we mostly stopped talking about CPU performance. Recently, however, there has been a seismic and exciting change in the CPU landscape, due to innovation by a chip company called Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Brad Mitchell ·
Show More