5 Best Hosting Providers for Adult Content Websites
If you’re already in the adult entertainment industry and you’re looking to change your adult website’s hosting provider, or just planning on starting an adult website, we’ve compiled a list of adult content friendly hosting providers for you, which will be more than happy to host your “special” content.
As you might already know, the adult entertainment industry – along with the gambling industry – is considered to be a special one. This means that there are hosting companies that won’t host any adult content on their server, and most times, hosting providers can have a rather vague definition of what qualifies as ‘adult content’.
Nonetheless, the adult industry is a highly competitive field, and according to an estimate, 13% of web searches are for erotic content and about 4% of the global internet traffic is driven by adult content. Because of the particularities of the industry, it can get quite cumbersome to find a great hosting and exposure.
The type of hosting to choose for your adult site, depends on what type of entertainment is your page going to provide (just images and gifs or video as well?). A shared hosting is a good place to start, at least until you build up an audience and drive more traffic to your website.
Shared hosting means that you’ll be sharing server resources with other websites hosted on the same server, however, good hosting companies do strive to offer a reliable and performant hosting environment even for lower-tier hosting plans like shared ones.
In this article, we’re going to focus on the features you need to look out for when searching for a hosting provider for your adult website, and which are – in our opinion – the best hosting providers for this type of content.
Company | From | ||
---|---|---|---|
# 1 |
$2.75 / mo |
||
# 2 |
$5 / mo |
||
# 3 |
$2.95 / mo |
||
# 4 |
$5.00 / mo |
||
# 5 |
$5.69 / mo |
How to Choose a Web Hosting for Adult Hosting?
First and foremost, it’s important to check whether your prospective hosting company allows the hosting of adult content. The last thing you want that after migrating from an existing hosting (often for the very same reason) or after setting up your first adult website, to receive a phone call or an email informing you that your new hosting company does not endorse any adult content in any shape or form whatsoever.
Therefore, it’s important that the hosting company should at least tolerate – if not welcome – adult content. In this niche, the hosting infrastructure comes second, but it’s also important.
A good adult hosting should have excellent server uptimes, advanced control panels (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, just to name a few), backup solutions, and a great deal of traffic included, because hosting an adult website usually means a lot of traffic in form of higher quality media files, whether they are images, videos, games, or audio.
Because of this higher traffic, not necessarily in page views, but in the sense of sheer traffic, it’s a plus if the hosting provider offers some sort of integrated CDN solution. A CDN will definitely speed up an adult website.
A good hosting provider should have a swift and prompt support whether you have a technical difficulty, or just a pre-sales question. If you are planning on starting a new website before buying the domain name, you should check to see if they offer free domain name registration.
A great hosting will usually have a free domain included in their plans, which can save you a couple of bucks and setting DNS server configurations (if you buy your domain at a different registrar).
Please remember, that when purchasing a domain for adult website, domain privacy is a must. Your domain registrar or your hosting should offer you domain privacy to protect your personal information. The hosting companies listed on this page offer private domain registration, so take advantage of this service when registering your domains.
5 Best Hosting for Adult Content
When compiling this list, we’ve focused on the adult-friendly nature, plans, features and reliability of these hosting companies. We’ve chosen to review their shared hosting plans, which are some of the most affordable ones in the industry, yet they come with enough muscle power to help you kick-start your adult entertainment related projects.
HostGator
HostGator made a name for itself in the hosting business, it’s a well known and loved brand. They offer a wide variety of services from shared hosting plans, cloud based hosting, up to dedicated servers. It’s good to know that if your website grows, you can move from a shared hosting plan to a virtual or dedicated server.
Building your adult website with WordPress is easy, so I assume you will choose this CMS. With WordPress you can build any type of website: blog, shop, forum, etc. You can easily handle user permission and give or restrict them from certain pages or content. This is perfect for you, if you want to make a membership adult website.
Hosting a WordPress website with HostGator is easy, because their hosting is optimized for WordPress. You can start your site on one of their shared plans. The HatchlingPlan, starts at $2.75 / month, includes unlimited space and bandwidth, and free SSL certificate. For multiple websites you can opt for the BabyPlan, which costs $3.95 / month. If you are processing payments on your website and need dedicated IP and SSL, the BusinessPlan is the way to go.
Each plan comes with a 99.9% uptime and 45-day money back guarantee. Although you will be able to claim $100 Google AdWords and $100 Bing Ads credits, this is worthless for you, because these ad networks do not allow advertising adult content.
All hosting plans are powered by cPanel control panel, making it easy for you to manage your websites, domains, files and emails. Automatic backups are performed on weekly basis. 24/7 premium support via phone and live chat as well network monitoring is also offered to each customer.
HostGator offers lots of other hosting plans, which will come in handy when your website outgrows the server resources offered by the shared hosting plans. In this case you can upgrade to cloud hosting, VPS or dedicated server. The upgrade process is very simple. Their support will assist you with upgrading your plan.
ViceTemple
ViceTemple is a true adult web hosting provider. They present themselves as an adult hosting company. So if you are solely into the adult industry, ViceTemple is the host to go.
The company was established in 2016, being part of a large network of specialized hosting solutions, which has been in the business for more than 8 years.
ViceTemple offers a wide range of server options for different needs. Their servers are located in Amsterdam, Europe and are privately owned.
Every hosting service comes with cPanel, which is a standard in the industry. All shared plans offer unlimited traffic, free SSL certificate, 1 dedicated IP and various sized web space. The main differences between their shared plans are the number of allowed domains, number of databases and the size of allocated SSD storage.
VPS and dedicated servers are also available for reasonable prices. You can also register your domains with them.
The company offers lots of features, that other standardized hosting providers don’t. ViceTemple guarantees 99.99% uptime through the entire year. Most main-stream hosting providers should be joules about this.
ViceTemple also offers full data privacy, which ensures that nobody will access your private space on your server and they will not share any information with third-parties.
You can purchase your hosting account at ViceTemple using PayPal, Credit Card, Bitcoin, Altcoin or Bank Transfer.
The company claims that copyright claims are ignored. Though, you should be aware that it is illegal to distribute copyrighted material.
It is prohibited to host content on their server which involves real violence, animals or underage explicit content.
You don’t have anything to lose with ViceTemple, thanks to their 30-day full money back guarantee policy.
FastComet
Update: Unfortunately FastComet no longer accepts adult content on their shared servers. Though, you can still use their VPS or dedicated servers to host adult websites.
FastComet is not nearly as popular as HostGator, but their service is just as good. The company offers a wide range of hosting plans and services: shared hosting, cloud VPS, dedicated hosting, hosting for WordPress, Joomla, OpenCart and more. They also offer a SiteBuilder tool which enables you to launch your website in just few minutes.
Their smallest hosting plan, StartSmart starts at $2.95 / month and allows hosting a single website. This plan also includes a free domain name for life, 15GB SSD space and unmetered traffic. If you want to build more than one adult website, you might want to go straight for the next plan, ScaleRight. This shared hosting plan starts at $5.95 / month, includes a free domain, 25GB SSD space, unmetered traffic and allows hosting multiple websites.
The shared plans include free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, which is essential not only for encrypting your user’s personal data, but it is also a must for Google rankings.
Daily backups, 24/7 customer support as well a 45-day money back guarantee is part of the deal.
The good thing about FastComet is that you can upgrade your hosting plan as your website grows. Adult websites can gain huge traffic very quickly if advertised properly. Here comes in play their cloud VPS hosting plans and dedicated servers. With their scalable platform you can serve as many users as you want.
eHost
Update: Unfortunately eHost no longer accepts new customers.
eHost offers a value deal, for only $2.75/month (36 months commitment), they are one of the most affordable adult content friendly hosting. eHost hosting accounts come with unmetered storage and bandwidth, this means that if your site falls within the normal range of usage, you’re going to be fine.
eHost accounts have one cPanel control panel, this means that you can manage all your domains and subdomains, emails, etc. from a single control panel. cPanel is a great tool for managing your hosting account. Also, if you are migrating from another hosting, it can get you up and running in no time. eHost does not impose limits on the number of hosted domains.
They also offer PayPal integration, unlimited email accounts, which can be accessed either via the web interface or via IMAP/POP. The unlimited email accounts come with unlimited email forwarders.
eHost is a good choice if you are planning on starting your first adult content website (they also offer a 45-day money-back guarantee) or you’re willing to migrate from an existing hosting provider.
HostClear
Update: Unfortunately HostClear no longer accepts new customers.
HostClear is another good hosting provider for websites with adult content. They offer hosting with the well-established cPanel as its control panel. If you are committing for a longer period, they offer a free domain registration .com, .org, .net, .info or .biz. To take full advantage of this offer, you should not choose .info domain as they are usually cheaper than the .com or .org counterparts.
HostClear hosting fees start from $6.99 per month on the monthly billing plan and get low as $2.99 for the 36-month period. HostClear offers unmetered bandwidth and storage which can become handy especially for an adult related website, because you don’t have to worry about storage space or the whole site becoming just a page saying that you run out of bandwidth.
You can host unlimited number of domains with HostClear, and you can use their email system either via your web browser or via email clients using POP3 or IMAP. HostClear offers 1GB of cloud storage, which you can use to save copies of your most important data like the MySQL databases, which are also unlimited. Overall, HostClear is a great choice because you don’t have to worry about the important hosting bits since they are either unlimited or unmetered.
IdeaHost
Update: Unfortunately IdeaHost no longer accepts new customers.
IdeaHost also offers unlimited domain hosting inside a single cPanel account, they offer shared web hosting for websites with adult content for a $2.99 monthly fee. IdeaHost has 24/7 support system, which will help you if you are at a loss, or you have technical difficulties, and they promise that your calls will be answered in 2 minutes.
They allow hosting of unlimited domains, which is more than enough for anybody. The shared hosting package from IdeaHost includes free domain name, unmetered storage and unmetered bandwidth, the hosting plan costs $2.99 per month if you sign up for 36 months.
IdeaHost is built with simplicity in mind, providing you good value for money, unlimited shared hosting, marketing tools, ad credit, website builder, and all that’s necessary for your website to be up and running as smoothly and as quickly as possible.
ASmallOrange
Update: ASmallOrange no longer accept hosting of adult websites!
ASmallOrange has 4 shared hosting plans, which are ideal for adult content. Tiny starting at just $2.92 a month is literally tiny with its 5GB of included bandwidth and 500 MB of hosting space and the ability host only 1 domain, but it’s ideal for new sites, which might need quite some time till they get traction.
The Small package comes at $5 a month and includes 5GB of storage with 50GB of bandwidth, it has the ability to host unlimited number of websites. For $10 a month you can get the Medium plan with its 15GB of storage 150GB of bandwidth and the capacity to host unlimited number of websites. The biggest shared hosting plan at A Small Orange is the Large one with a $20 per month price tag.
The Large plan has 30GB of storage 500GB of bandwidth, and unlimited website hosting. All hosting plans come with a cPanel as their control panel and POP3/IMAP enabled email accounts. Their servers are optimized for running WordPress based websites, which does not mean that they underperform in hosting other types of CMS like Drupal or Joomla, quite the contrary. It’s important to note that the prices are a month to month based prices, and if you can commit to one, two or even three years you can get lower prices.
Conclusion
Because of the specialness of adult content in general, it’s important you make sure that the chosen hosting company permits hosting your content. Apart from this, the same features that you would find important for hosting a “normal” website apply for adult hosting as well.
Great server uptimes, excellent technical support, secure server settings – especially in a shared hosting environment – and to have the necessary modules if you are planning on using them. We are sure that you can find a great hosting provider from the above lists, which will fit your budget and satisfy your needs.
Great article, thanks. I just checked and eHost, IdeaHost and HostClear all are going offline and recommending new customers to try iPage (who must have bought them, I guess). iPage does not allow adult content under their terms of service.
That is unfortunate. I guess that those customers who signed up with eHost, IdeaHost or HostClear, will need to switch to another adult hosting provider, because as far as I know, iPage does not allow adult content.
In my opinion HostGator is a good alternative to the enumerated providers. HostGator might be slightly more expensive, but they are in business for a very long time, and it is unlikely that they will close any time soon.