Most blogs don’t have to worry about the legal issues that come with hosting adult content on their site. The content on blogs in most genres, though it can be coarse and vulgar at times, simply doesn’t rise (or sink) to a level where you need to worry about the legal issue along this front.

However, more and more bloggers are beginning to wade into this territory. These include sex blogs that openly discuss mature issues, photographers and artists whose work often pushes boundaries in this area and even, on some occasions, unrelated blogs that discuss tangential issues that require the hosting of adult content.

No matter which category you fall in or even if you don’t plan on ever hosting any adult material, it’s important to know where the rules like currently and what is expected of you as a publisher. However, it’s also very important to note that, even more so than with other discussions on law, this one is aimed at a U.S. audience and you will definitely want to check your local laws to make sure you comply with them.

So what are the rules with hosting adult content on your site? There simply too many to cover all of them in this article but here are some of the fundamentals you need to be aware of. read more

One of the beautiful things about building your own site is that you can choose where you want to host it and what you want the domain to be. On that front, the Web provides nearly limitless choices with hosts in nearly every corner of the earth and hundreds of domain extensions. The room for opportunity and creativity is incredible.

However, where you host and where what you choose for your domain has a large bearing on your site and there are many factors that you need to consider.

Many of the factors are actually technical. Your server’s proximity to your visitors affects its speed and not all countries are as well connected as you would like for hosting a site. For example, you wouldn’t want to host a site aimed at an Asian audience somewhere in rural South America.

But on top of the technical considerations are legal ones. Whenever you sign up for a hosting account in another country, you’re doing more than moving your site there, you are, in many regards, subjecting yourself to the laws of that nation.

That can have some dire consequences for your site if you aren’t careful and, in extreme cases, can even result in your arrest and possible extradition.

In short, thinking about these issues is an important consideration when choosing a host, but one that few actually weigh. read more

Hosting often is one of the more difficult decisions to make when starting a website and our own Jonathan Bailey has written several entries on the topic already, over at BloggingPro, as part of his Blogging Pitfalls column. The main problem with hosting though is that often YMMV applies and what one thinks is a great host, could be horrible experience for the next user. I recently switched several sites to Hostgator and here’s my experience with them.

One of the main reasons why it often is difficult to decide on a host, is that the user never knows whether the server they receive space on is oversold or not. Most hosting companies, especially larger ones do oversell, in order to keep the price down. Often this results in the dilemma: “Do I go with a larger, and cheaper, host company or do I decide for a smaller company which is more expensive?”. read more

After launching a WordPress only hosting environment outside the walls of Automattic many moons ago, Page.ly is now offering businesses a way to build their own WordPress empires without mucking in the world of servers and geeks.

For our next trick we are releasing the new Page.ly Vertical Platform. In a nutshell it allows selected partners to customize their own page.ly hosting system to augment their existing service, under their brand.

As an example; our launch partner Graph Paper Press is offering a customized WP install with their entire set of themes and specialized upgrades at http://pro.graphpaperpress.com.   Their market vertical is made of Photographers primarily and they have “rolled a custom install” to serve this vertical market. So rather then their customer coming to page.ly for hosting, their customer purchases a theme+support+hosting bundle in a single transaction directly from Graph Paper Press. All the benefits of page.ly like the upgrades and security go with it. Pretty snazzy eh? (Official Page.ly Blog) read more

Since some days a rather nasty hack has been going round in the WordPress community. I actually noticed it myself not that long when I googled for ‘Chris Pearson‘ and what I saw in the results was… shall we say ‘interesting’?

Prozac, Levitra, Lexapro? Had Chris sold the ‘Best Damn Blog on the Planet’, AKA Pearsonified? I went to check out Chris’ blog but no. No Prozac, Levitra or anything else of suspicious nature to be found there. Just your regular well-tuned Pearson content. I even looked in the source code and a quick search for known brands ended empty. I left again, having long forgotten already why I googled Chris in the first place.

Now it seems though that this hack is making the rounds and becoming more and more popular. Leland Fiegel from Themelab first reported about it on first reported about it on the Themelab blog, more than a month ago already. Afterwards the issue was covered over at the WP Tavern forums but no solution has been found so far. Even the WordPress Lead Developer, Mark Jaquith, is left clueless and hopes to solve the issue ASAP. read more

When you’re an up-and-coming free blog service like Posterous, with some big name users on your books, then you need to ensure your web hosting is up to scratch.

To that end, Posterous has chosen The Rackspace Cloud to handle its hosting requirements.

The move means that the multimedia files users send to the Posterous service, for publication and dissemination via a number of other online services, will be stored on Rackspace’s Cloud Files. read more

Uptime monitoring service Pingdom now supports alerts via Twitter, which means that you could get tweets when your site goes down. This is great since it offers realtime public information about downtime, and puts more pressure on the web hosts. After all, if you’re an open customer of Host X, then tweets about your site going up and down all the time will hurt their brand and hopefully force them to try harder.

People already search Twitter for information about various service outages, and for those who choose to send out their Pingdom alerts publicly on Twitter this will now add more information to that. We hope this will lead to more facts and less speculation.

Transparency, gotta love it! So now when tdhedengren.com or tdh.me fails, you know you can blame Media Temple, and when tdh.se is down you should bitch to Binero.

Get your own free Pingdom monitoring account to try it out. Just add Twitter in your site settings within the account.

Rather late to the blogging party, and deciding that a dedicated blog hosting package is better than a generic one, Network Solutions has announced its nsHosting for WordPress package that’s supposed to make it easy to set up and maintain a WordPress blog.

According to Network Solutions’ senior director of web presence, Navin Ganeshan, customers have been asking for WordPress. This strikes me as a little odd, given that the couple of times I’ve set up web hosting on a standard Network Solutions account, WordPress has always been an installation option, but perhaps it’s just about marketing to a certain audience. read more

Where 15 years ago, having a Web site was something of a badge of nerdiness, today having a site doesn’t require much technical knowledge at all. Someone with almost no technical expertise can set up an account on WordPress.com or Blogger and be blogging within minutes.

However, this doesn’t mean that a blogger can get away with being a technical dunce. Though getting words on the Internet is pretty simple, building and growing a blog does require one to know a bit more than how to flip on a PC. Social networking sites make it easy to get online, but blogging, especially over the long haul, takes something more.

So what are those things that every blogger should know? There are many, definitely more than what is on this list, but here are five things every would-be blogger should know before, or at least shortly after, getting started. read more

There are many reasons one might want to learn more information about a site they are visiting. Perhaps the site is a competitor that is beating you in the search engine rankings. It could be that the site is a spam blog or other site warranting an abuse report to their host. Maybe they are just curious to find out who is hosting the fast-moving server, making them want to switch to their host.

Whatever the reason, cutting through the veil of a site to learn what makes it tick can be a tricky feat, especially for those who are not familiar with the inner workings of the Web. Navigating through a mess of Whois results and DNS information can be very useful, but also intimidating.

So how does one learn more about a site, preferably without being inundated with confusing information? Here are five simple bookmarklets that can teach you more about a site with just one click. read more