Since there is another, similar thread, I always wondered - what are the pros and cons of adult hosting from a technical/contractual perspective? We've never done any (that I know of), but I am curious about the difference, if any, as customers.
Should they be on another network or netblock, like the IRC'ers, or are they decent neighbors? Do they pay on time? Bitch about bandwidth bills? Does/can your upstream get cranky? I don't think mine even has an opinion, never came up during the "negotiations". (bleh - another topic.)
We don't do any real hosting but all my customers do, so I'm interested in that too.

I would prefer not to descend into the moral/ethical issues - I've read too many of those threads - and we've made our decisions already.

Tom

They are decent neighbors, only reason you may want to put them on a different network is because they use a lot of bandwidth.

Most of them pay on time and have money.

Somewhat, people who run adult sites are always looking for cheap bandwidth but usually have some experience and will not believe things like unlimited bandwidth.

It depends on your upstream. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the laws where your servers are located and do not accept any sites that even seem slightly illegal.

Reliability and cheap bandwidth is what you have to have.

This isn't from practical experience, though neither is it a judgment. Still, it might be helpful. Perhaps some with practical experience might answer.

Since adult sites may consume large amounts of bandwidth, I wonder if getting a deposit to cover a month or two of bandwidth expense (adjusted as it increases) would be a good idea, almost requisite.

It seems to me there are two types of adult sites, those that have the actual content and those that are plastered with banners leading to the sites with content. The former would have the greater technical demands as some have live video feeds, video cams, big downloads, etc.

With all the competition in that industry, it seems to me that some sites might get started on a small budget hoping to increase traffic and generate income. They could very easily rack up a bandwidth bill they might not be able to pay if the site generates traffic and not revenue. Competition is fierce.

Of course, if the site is successful, they would have too much to lose by not paying their bills. Downtime is costly in most any business. It's the period before they are successful where I think a host might be at risk without a deposit.

I'd be interested in responses on this from those who know also.

In general, they have more money because they earn more than the average "I got a web site too guy", and spend more money for hosting because they have the traffic.

Usually even the ****tiest traffic pays for the bandwidth itself in terms of revenue generated through that traffic, unless the webmaster is very unexperienced and hosts pics with 150 Kb each for free, so having used up too much bandwidth and not beeing able to pay for it won't happen very often.

The vast majority are uncle joe webmasters who just make galleries all day long as a second income. They use a lot of bandwith, one gallery posted at one of the big link sites will burn about 5-15 GB in a day, and that will last for 3-7 days. But there are free hosts, and only the more experienced (and successful) ones will host these free sample sites on paid hosting.

The more experienced webmasters deal with search engines too and have lots of domains and need many IP's.

End of the line are the paysite and webmaster program owners. The bigger ones surely need quite a bit of traffic since all these others mentioned above send the traffic to them, and the paysite owner host the tours of the paysites, and the members areas of course.