Here's a newbie's guide to setting up an adult website without any extensive programming or scripting knowledge and with the lowest possible investment. In fact, the total cost incurred while setting up my Website was $7/month.
Choosing A Web Host
First of all, get yourself a Web host. Below is a filtered list of Web hosts - both free and paid. This list contains only hosts which I have tried myself and found to be satisfactory. Obviously, there are a lot of other hosts who may be better, and you will find a lot of adult Webmaster resources listing them.
Protgp.com offers paid hosting starting at $7/month with 150MB space, 4 GB bandwidth. Includes CGI, Perl, php4, mySQL, a reseller plan, and Flash support, e-commerce ready, 200 POP/SMTP email addresses, password protected directories and more.
XXX Porn Server offers free hosting with 100MB space, and 'unlimited' bandwidth. Allowed file types are: .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .mov, .wsf, .asf, .mpeg, .mpg with external linking allowed. While they don't allow you to use FTP clients to upload to your site, they have their own interface which is a bit roundabout and you cannot download files from your own site. But, the best part is they have no pop-ups, only small header and footer ads, and even better, their server is fast. Your pages, especially image galleries, load super fast.
For maximum efficiency and economy, I would suggest that you register with both, and divide your files among them - the protected folders such as membership scripts and pay to view services at Protgp.com and the public or open folders at XXX Porn Server.
Choosing Your Content
The next step depends on whether you plan to buy or shoot your content or whether you want it all for free. If you plan to put up exclusive content, get it all ready first. Or else, to get free content, join up with the following sponsors. There are a lot (and I mean a lot), of sponsors offering free content in exchange for you promoting them to your visitors with banners, pop-ups, text links and any other way that you can send them productive traffic. Listed below are the sponsors that I am using myself, who offer downloadable picture files, plus galleries and movie files in zip format. Also, some sponsors offer hosted galleries (meaning all you have to do is put up a text or image link to a gallery hosted by the sponsor. So, you don't need to use any server space or bandwidth. The downside is that it doesn't add to the content on your site).
- DDGcash - My favorite sponsor.
- Dannicash - Offers high quality photo and video galleries combined into one page, updated every 15 days.
- Pornstarbucks - The official homepages of Jenna Jamieson, Brianna Banks and a lot of other porn stars.
- Facialcash - The cum specialists.
- Pornopayouts - Their sites Moviedrive.com and Spunkmouth.com have very high conversions using movie thumbs linked to full page samples.
- Ezacash - Offers downloadable movies and zip files.
- Maxcash - Offers tons of downloadable picture galleries from Kara's XXX, one of the most successful porn sites on the Web.
- Freesitecontent - Add value to your site with these live video plugins.
- Amateur Pages - They have hosted galleries you can put on your site, which change dynamically everyday.
- Mpegdollars - Offers cool sites, zipped gallery pages and hosted movie pages; just be sure to read all terms and conditions carefully before you signup.
Choosing Software & Scripts
Ok, you've chosen a Web host, and have your hard drive full of free content. Now, the next step would be to collect the tools, software and scripts necessary to put up all of this in a clean and appealing format. Here's a list of the software I use:
- Macromedia's Dreamweaver – HTML Editor
- WSFTPPro FTP Client - Lets you upload files to your Web host.
- Express Gallery Maker - Makes instant galleries from picture files.
- Streamauthor - A multimedia editing tool.
- Video Joiner - Useful for joining multiple mpeg files to make one big movie.
And a list of sources for helpful scripts:
- Amember - A membership script from cgi-central.net
- Matt's Script Archive - Tons of useful scripts just a download away.
- Menu Script - I tried menu building software from at least four different companies, and found that either they had pop-ups when you see the menu on the Net or there's some blocking mechanism. So, I finally decided to code it myself. Click Here to get the source code; just copy paste and change the URL's and names to make your own menu.
Now that we have our hosting, content and tools, let's get to work: Stay tuned for Part 2!
