Entries Tagged 'Web hosting' ↓

I have had Dreamhost as my webhost for years. If you’re looking for a webhost that will let you have unlimited domains and permits you to do almost anything with your account. They don’t have a fast and dirty sitebuilder. I definitely recommend against fast and dirty sites, but hey, whatever you want to do, it’s your site.

Shop around. If you decide to go with Dreamhost, use this code: 6ZZIBMU2 and get a $50 discount.

Yahoo has been unreliable forever, and lately I have heard girls complaining that Eyeball Chat has been down and out more than it has been available.

Some girls do sightspeed, which has the annoying feature of making it really easy for a customer to record your cam within the program, so many avoid it.

I also know a few who use Paltalk, but the viewer has to pay for an account to watch, so that doesn’t work for too many.

I use a company called influxis.com. It’s a flash media host, which means that it hosts and streams your feed on flash, which is about the most common format there is nowadays.

I had looked at buying software to put in a video chatroom, but all of them cost a bundle (like $1000 for a real video chatroom), and then after you paid, you still had to get a flash media server.

With this one, you get a bundle of free chatroom and broadcast scripts that come configured for your website. So you do need a site to put the embed code on.

I was chatting with a guy on yahoo who wanted to show me his cam, but it froze up every couple of minutes. I sent him to one of my chatrooms, and the picture was perfect, no more freezeups.

Plans start at $10 a month and the cost is determined by how much bandwidth you use and how many simultaneous connections you want.

I’d like to say I’m getting a signup fee for saying this, but they don’t have an affiliate program for customers. Check it out if you have your own site. If you’re busy, it will more than pay for itself.

Probably you’ve heard the acronym ‘FTP’. Unless you’ve had to use it, you probably don’t know much about it. As far as FTP goes, what you don’t know can suddenly become extremely inconvenient for you.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It’s a way of moving files from one computer to another computer over the web. It is a lot faster than downloading them through HTTP, or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, which you access through links on regular html webpages. If I installed an FTP server on my computer, I could set you up an account and give you a username and password. You could then open your FTP client, go to the FTP address of my computer, log in, and download files from any directories that I had given you access to. I could choose to allow you to upload files, too.

In review…

The FTP server is the remote computer that hosts files for transfer. The FTP client is the software you use to get those files.

FTP for downloading purchased content

This is what happens when you buy content. The files are so large that it would take too long to transfer them just by clicking a link on a webpage, so they may set you up an account and let you download them that way.

My favorite FTP client is a free one, FTP995. It’s really easy to set up and use. I used to use Ipswitch, which I paid for, but I like this one better.

Edit to add: I haven’t used this one in a while. Lately I have used Filezilla client and FireFTP Firefox plugin.

The content company will give you their FTP address, your username, and your password. You just type that info in at the top. Click Connect, and you will go there and login.

Files will appear on the right and left side of the window. The ones on the right side are the remote computer. The ones on the left are your own computer. You need to decide where you want to put the content before downloading it. The top listing on the left is just directories and folders. Double click on a directory to find a subdirectory. Right click on a directory to create a new directory. If you are new to this and don’t have a directory where you put your photos, I recommend going to My Pictures and creating a new Content directory there. If you have bought photos of more than one model, create a new subdirectory within that for each new model, and within that for each set. Double-click the folder at the top with two dots next to it (which represents the directory you are in) to move back up a level.

When you reach the place where you want to download to and are all set, right-click the file on the right you want to download and select ‘download’ from the menu. Then wait. When it’s done, it will appear in the location on the left.

I know it seems like a pain, but it would be a nightmare later to straighten out if you get everything mixed up.

They will have the files zipped when you download. If double-clicking on the file icon doesn’t open it, this company also has a free unzip utility.
Software995

FTP for creating and managing websites

I know a lot of people who realize the need for a website find the idea of constructing one and putting it online to be somewhere between daunting and downright scary. It looks like there are so many things that can go wrong that if you make the wrong mistake you could inadvertently start World War III or cause the end of civilization as we know it.

Many webhosts capitalize on newbie fear by providing sitebuilders and a variety ways of getting a page online without having to use ftp. Most of them are very limiting. You will never learn how to run a website properly while using a setup like that. But the worst part is that when you start needing more services, they charge outrageous prices for them. It rapidly adds up to far more than the cost of a real web host, and you may not even be able to take your site with you when you do make the move. You’ll have to create a new one.

It’s not rocket science. It’s not even hard after you’ve done it like once. It’s just a different way of thinking that you may not be accustomed to. So let’s look at FTP.

Again, you install the FTP client software. Your webhost has given you the FTP address you need, your FTP username and password. Fill it in and connect. Then all you have to do is right-click a file on the left to select the ‘Upload’ option to upload it to your domain on the right.

Call your first html page index.html or index.htm. Upload it and this is what will show when somebody types your domain name in. Call your other pages whatever you want to and link to them from your index page.

Images? Videos? Recordings? Create an ‘Images’, ‘Videos’, or ‘Recordings’ directory and upload to it.

You can even re-download something you accidentally deleted or forgot where you put it on your computer.

Yes, we talked about this before. We covered some things in detail, in particular how to choose a host that will grow with you. I related the issue of how a free webhost can hold you back and prevent you from doing lots of the things you might want to do, even if they do permit adult.

Once again here I’m going to put in a plug for the freedom you get when you can host images on your own site and manage them as you please.

Even if all you want is to make a blog right now, putting it on your own website is a smart move. You can still drop blogs around here and there, so long as you’re staying within the tos of the free blog hosts. But for the blog that represents you, you’re putting a lot of work in on it. It should be yours, to do with as you wish.

If you’re going to put that much work in on it, you should have the option of making it a real site.

So here’s the story I’d like to relate to you. I spent much of this weekend installing a new website for a girlfriend who previously had a bunch of very strange pages created by a customer who knew nothing about web design or adult web design for PSO. Those pages were not only ugly in a 1992 sort of way, but they didn’t work right. You’d have to click a button several times to get a “mouseover” to work so the photo would show, instead of a large blank space. It was kind of a maze to get to her existing blogs, which were stuck with the default wordpress theme.

So I replaced the entry page with a really pretty one, the main page with one that links directly to her new blogs. Drop dead gorgeous if I do say so myself. And the blogs are very pretty, too.

Unfortunately, due to her choice of server, there were several problems that needed to be worked out. We never were able to change one of her settings, which would be necessary to get maximum indexing for her blogs.

But the big deal is that she selected this host because it looked like it would be good for a beginner. They had some kind of site builder, an uploader of sorts, and some other cool stuff that no longer works for her because her new computer has Vista. And the stuff she thought was going to save her time and money? While it made it harder (read: more work) for me, the biggest problem was making the blogs work right.

After a discussion on the forums:

Things could have been worse. At least she had apache/linux hosting. If she had chosen Windows hosting, as many “starter webhosts” offer, she would have had to move to another server to do what she wanted. You don’t want a Windows server. Just take my word for it.

If you have to pay somebody to install a blog for you, that’s an hour’s work, if nothing goes wrong. If there’s a problem, it can take several hours for somebody who knows what they’re doing to sort out the issue and fix it.

The problem is that when you pick a free wordpress theme, you may be getting something highly standard, or you may be getting something that seemed like a good idea at the time to the designer. Fixing a misbehaving theme can be a real pain. And none of this should be necessary, because if you choose a webhost that has simplified installation for wordpress, you click and you are ready. You are provided with a large number of themes that are ready to use. Dreamhost has “One click” installs for wordpress blogs and lots of other popular installations. On the rare occasions when I had issues, it was from upgrading very old blogs, and they went out of their way to fix them for me.

If my girlfriend had had to pay me for the time I spent straightening out her blog issues, she’d be out of money right now. The little bit of convenience back at the beginning that saved her doing research and asking for help would have ended up costing her a load of money in the end.

For those of you who are still nervous about what it means to use FTP to upload files and images to your website, I’ll be writing a little tutorial on that shortly. It has to be little. It’s a lot simpler than you could ever imagine.

Alright, if you already have a hosted website, ignore this. It wasn’t intended for you.

This was intended for you flirts who have been putting off getting your own website. You know you’ve been procrastinating, don’t you?
You’ve been sneaking by with some vanilla image host, like Photobucket. Upside: it’s free. Downside: they could delete your account at any moment for no reason at all. They will just send you an email that you violated their terms of service and all your photos are gone.

Or maybe you’re hosting photos on Niteflirt. Upside: it’s free and easy. Downside: you can’t upload animations, you’re allowed a limited number of photos, and maximum photo size is on the small side.

You can use a free image host like PSO hosting, one of the few free image hosts that allows adult images.

But if you have your own site, you can upload unlimited photos and other images, password protect areas for viewing by purchasers of usernames and passwords through payment mail buttons, and you can manage all this, too. You can change anything around at all without having to work within somebody else’s system.

Now that you’ve got your images hosted someplace, you still need to get that blog going. Phone Sex Blogs and Vixenblogs are two free blog hosts intended especially for PSO’s. There are other blog hosts that permit adult, to one extent or another. But there are a lot more hosts that will make your blog evaporate if they realize you’ve put adult content on it.

Edit to add: After writing this, I created a new account, and wanted to start a free blog rather than buy a domain. I started a new blog with Phone Sex Blogs, but my admin area was such a mess of php errors that I wasn’t even able to delete it. I wasn’t able to start a new blog at Vixenblogs, as the registration page was missing. I emailed for help, and a week later it was working fine. But the whole situation turned into a major bother.

It would cause serious problems if something were to happen to your blog and it went away.

Free blogs are good for getting traffic off the blog index. A good site will hopefully have visitors who cruise looking at new posts. But if you want maximum flexibility in the future, installing a WordPress blog on your own site will give you that. You can use free blogs to entice readers to visit your site.

You can advertise affiliates, or anything else you want to sell, modify the template to make the blog suit your needs better. You can even sell advertising and maybe make some money. But most of all, the blog will be part of your site.

There is at least one free web host that permits adult. Any that don’t permit it will delete your account if they find out you’re breaking their tos. But when you use a free host there are strings attached. You will probably have ugly ads. You will have very limited web page capacity, and you may have to use their sitebuilder to construct your site. You may find that being able to do anything that remotely looks like a decent website requires an upgrade that will cost you almost as much as getting a real web host.

Some toplists won’t list a site that has a free webhost, even if you bought a domain.

I know site builders sound comforting, but in the amount of time it takes to learn to produce a halfway presentable page using one, you could have learned to produce a simple page or listing in html.

The worst free site is one that leaks your traffic. Back when I first started, my blogs were on Vixenblogs, now a cool free blog site for PSO’s. Back then my pages were covered with ads for phone sex from other Niteflirt girls and companies, free phone sex, or free hookups with real sluts in my town. Why would anybody call me?

There is someone offering free web hosting to flirts in exchange for having her Niteflirt 800 number as contact. But if you dial that number and try your extension, you will get a message that you can’t be reached through that number. It only goes to girls at her company. Be wary!

Face it. You want to be able to have a site with multiple pages, including a blog, pages about you, photo galleries, maybe a slideshow, advertising for affiliates, maybe even a members area. You want it all to look like a hot and sexy package, not something that looks like an afterthought.

Click the links and compare plans. See what comes with a plan. Think about what you’ll want on your site. Keep in mind that you’ll probably never need more than the cheapest plan at any real webhost.