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I'm about to embark on a web application in the adult web-space. As the product is web-based, it requires hosting. Does anyone know if there are legitimate hosting providers that allow the hosting of

  1. Adult textual content (discussions, text)
  2. Adult media content (images and/or video).
  3. Payment for goods (is paying to access a site a good or service?) for the adult web application.

I understand this question may upset some people - that is not my intent ... so please keep this thread as mature and content-agnostic as possible :)

I'm guessing there will need to be some legal entity created in some legal country to abide with their legal laws. As to the process, country, laws etc.. I'm hoping some people here might be able to provide legit links to sites or discussions of this nature.

I repeat - this is NOT a thread about links to sites OF adult content or illegal content. I cannot stress that enough.

HopelessN00b
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Pure.Krome
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  • Good luck with that ;) As far as I can recall, the one time I was involved in this a few years ago the client had to go to like Switzerland to get hosting because no Australian faculity would touch it with a 10-foot pole. – Mark Henderson Jul 20 '09 at 05:36
  • Yep. This is what I expect (which is fine). I'm just not sure of what the legal solution is these days because it has to be all above board and transparent, etc. Which I'm sure can be done and is currently the case for many adult / gambling based applications out there. – Pure.Krome Jul 20 '09 at 06:18
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    It's a bit sad to see such an amount of disclaimers and associated trouble for what is (hopefully) a legitimate online business. – Tiberiu Ana Jul 20 '09 at 09:04
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    Props for creating the "adult" tag, so people can add it to their ignored tags list if this is really going to rub them the wrong way. – Kara Marfia Jul 20 '09 at 13:21

2 Answers2

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I used to do a fair amount of work in the space. The lessons I learned were

  1. Don't do billing yourself. Use ccbill, jetbill, ibill, or whoever. They do it better than you and their fraud prevention works or they'd be out of business. Adult content has much stricter chargeback rules and all sorts of things normal merchants don't have to deal with.

  2. Password sharing or stealing of user accounts is a big pain. There are a few packages that are installed as Apache modules, Pennywise I think was one we used. There are others or you'll need to think about how you're handling sessions more so than usual.

  3. national-net.com hosts a number of larger sites. I think a few of our old customers ended up there. I don't recall them being a stellar in any way.

kashani
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See my comment attached to the question ;)

We did find a biller however, ccbill. From memory their fees were astronomical, however they provided complete anonymity (as is pertinant in these scenarios) and when you call up their support and quote the name of the website the girl on the other end was not in the least bit surprised. I guess they get it 20 times a day, and were very professional about it.

Mark Henderson
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  • with ccbill, I couldn't find any documentation about an API? Is there one? (there has to be, somewhere....) – Pure.Krome Jul 20 '09 at 06:20
  • There definately is one, but from memory it's more like PayPal's where you send name/value pairs and it takes care of the payment (on their domain) and then somehow posts you the username/password assigned to the user... – Mark Henderson Jul 20 '09 at 21:30