Quick outline:
- What I built and why it mattered
- Hosts I used: what worked, what didn’t
- Speed, uptime, and cost notes
- Payments, rules, and safety bits I wish I knew
- Clear picks for starter, growing, and heavy traffic sites
Why I needed the right host
I run a small 18+ site. It has short video clips, soft photo sets, and a few member pages. Nothing illegal, ever. I needed a host that allows legal adult content. I also needed steady speed, fast support, and a CDN for peaks. And, yes, I wanted fair prices. I don’t like surprise bills. Who does?
You know what? Finding a host that says yes up front saves so much time. Some hosts smile in sales chat, then block you later. I learned that the hard way.
If you're still comparing policies, the in-depth guide on WebSpaceHost walks through exactly which questions to ask before you pull out your card.
If you’d like the full, unfiltered saga—including logs and benchmarks—my expanded write-up lives here: Hosting Adult Content: My Hands-On Review. It drills even deeper into policy gotchas and migration tricks.
MojoHost: Rock solid when traffic spikes
MojoHost is known in the adult space. I used a managed VPS for three months. It wasn’t cheap, but it felt safe and stable.
- My plan: managed VPS (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, NVMe). I paid $109/month.
- My traffic in month two: about 420,000 visits, 3.1 TB bandwidth.
- Uptime I saw: 99.98% over 90 days (UptimeRobot checks every 1 minute).
- Support: 5 tickets. Fastest reply came in 6 minutes; longest took 38 minutes. Night shift was still awake and kind.
- Real test: A creator reposted us, and traffic shot up 6x for a day. They added burst capacity and tuned PHP-FPM without extra drama.
Pros: They know adult rules. DMCA? They handled it with a clear process. No finger pointing. SSL, backups, and WAF (a web firewall) were included.
Cons: Price is higher. Also, their portal looks old-school. It works, but it’s not cute. Still, when my site stayed up, I stopped caring.
For extra peace of mind, MojoHost’s customer scores are public on Trustpilot and paint a similar picture.
ViceTemple: A simple, cheap start that didn’t yell “no”
I set up a small gallery and blog on ViceTemple for testing. It’s very adult-friendly, and the starter plan was low-cost.
- My plan: shared hosting “Premium” at $11/month, later moved to a VPS at $29/month.
- Content: mostly images and short 720p clips.
- Speed: fine for images; video needed a CDN to feel smooth.
- Support: chat was helpful with migration and DNS. Not super fast, but not slow either.
Pros: They say “adult allowed” right on the tin. No guessing. Setup took me under 30 minutes.
Cons: Shared hosting slowed down when my post hit 35k views in a day. Moving to the VPS fixed that, but you need to plan for growth. Also, their status page updates could be clearer.
A2 Hosting: Friendly support, okay for legal 18+ content
I used A2 for a creator landing site and a light members area. They allow legal adult content. Their Turbo plan felt snappy.
- My plan: Turbo Boost shared at $9.99/month promo, later $14.99/month renewal.
- TTFB (time to first byte): about 120–180 ms from US East on a cached page.
- Uptime: 99.95% over two months.
- Support: I liked their chat. Real person, no scripty walls. They helped switch to LiteSpeed cache with easy steps.
Pros: Good speed/cost for small projects. Clear about legal content.
Cons: Don’t push heavy video from shared hosting. Use a CDN or object storage. Otherwise, you’ll see timeouts after a burst.
DreamHost: Chill policies and honest billing
DreamHost didn’t play games. I ran a photo-first site and later moved the videos off to storage.
- My plan: VPS at $20/month (2 GB RAM).
- Bandwidth month two: 1.2 TB.
- What worked: Their panel is clean. Backups saved me once after I broke a plugin. Yes, that was me.
Pros: Straightforward TOS, decent speed, fair price.
Cons: Not built for big video without extra tools. You’ll need a CDN for peaks and maybe a separate store for larger files.
DigitalOcean + Cloudflare: Full control, but you do the work
When I wanted more control, I ran a DigitalOcean droplet with OpenLiteSpeed and CyberPanel. Cloudflare sat in front for cache and DDoS protection.
- My setup: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM at $24/month. Added a 200 GB volume for media at $20/month.
- Cache rules: Cloudflare cached images and thumbs; I bypassed cache for signed video URLs.
- Peak day: 600 Mbps sustained for 2 hours, no downtime.
- Gotcha: You must patch and monitor. I set up Fail2Ban, logwatch, and weekly reboot windows.
A dedicated IP can also smooth SSL quirks and maintain a cleaner sender reputation if you’re running your own mail server—my side-by-side tests are summed up in this review: Dedicated IP Web Hosting.
Pros: Cheap for the power. Cloudflare helped block scraper bots and random floods. Orange cloud on, WAF rules on, done.
Cons: You are the IT team. If a kernel patch hits at 2 a.m., guess who is awake? Yep.
Storage and video bits that saved me
- S3 storage: I used Amazon S3 for originals. It’s boring and that’s good. Legal adult is allowed.
- CloudFront or Cloudflare: I used Cloudflare for most stuff. For member videos, signed URLs kept hotlinkers away.
- Bitrate matters: My sweet spot was 720p at 2.5 Mbps H.264. Looks fine on mobile and cuts costs fast.
- Thumbnails: Pre-generate them. Don’t make PHP do it live. My CPU thanked me.
The rules: put them front and center
I kept it legal and clean:
- Age gate: “18+ only” splash page with a simple “Enter / Leave” choice.
- 2257 compliance where needed. Records stored offline and backed up.
- DMCA: have a clear email posted. Respond fast. It lowers risk.
- Consent: creator contracts signed. Use simple, plain language.
- Geo-block if a region has stricter laws. Cloudflare can help with that.
Here’s the thing: hosts care most about law and abuse. If you’re clear and fast, they’ll treat you well.
Payments that didn’t hate me
Normal processors blocked me. So I used:
- CCBill for subscriptions and one-time buys.
- Segpay as a backup.
- Crypto as a small extra. Not my main thing, but it helped a few fans.
Fees were higher than Stripe or PayPal, sure. But these folks understand adult. Fewer headaches.
Real numbers from my notes
- MojoHost VPS: 99.98% uptime, 3.1 TB in a busy month, page loads ~1.1–1.6s on cached pages.
- ViceTemple VPS: fine under 150k visits/month; add a CDN past that.
- A2 Turbo shared: great for landing pages and blogs; keep videos off-box.
- DreamHost VPS: simple to run, steady at 1–2 TB/month with CDN.
- DO + Cloudflare: most control per dollar; hands-on work.
Small tweak that helped everywhere: WebP images. I cut image size by about 35–55% versus JPG. Looks the same to most eyes.
Costs I actually paid
- Starter range: $10–30/month (shared or small VPS) plus $5–15 for a CDN.
- Mid range: $60–140/month (managed VPS) plus object storage and CDN, maybe $30–80 extra.
- Heavy: $200+ when traffic and video grow. Still cheaper than losing a day of uptime.
I’ve also started looking at policies that cover downtime, data loss, and even extortion attempts; my honest take on whether “hosting insurance” is worth it is here: Web Hosting Insurance – My Real Take.
I know, no one loves bills. But planned spend beats emergency spend.
What I wish I knew on day one
- Ask sales in writing: “Do you allow legal adult content, including video?” Keep the reply.
- Cache your images. Cache your CSS/JS. Don’t cache logged-in pages.
- Use signed URLs for member videos. Hotlinkers are sneaky.
- Put DMCA info in your footer. It shows you’re serious and fair.
- Test a takedown path. Make sure you can remove or replace a file in minutes.