Adult Web Hosting: The Right Way To Do It
It’s still 1 of the greatest moneymakers on the web. It still gets more traffic than most other web-based industries. So if you are considering starting an adult website, it is certainly no wonder why. With some business acumen, a bit of ethics, and certain knowledge of the law, you can make quite a living in the adult web hosting industry. The concentrate of this article is the legalities of running an adult website — or how to run an adult website without getting yourself in a entire heap of trouble — and there is a lot to it. So let’s get started.
Laws relating to adult web hosting are localized, meaning that they vary depending on the town/city, state, or country both you and your audience is in. That can present a large problem, as you the webmaster can only do your ideal to abide by all of the laws of all locality in which you plan to do business. Fortunately, most all laws in this area are based around a single concept, the understanding of which can help your adult website avoid getting targeted. That concept is: obscenity.
Though obscenity has numerous disparate definitions, as it applies to adult web hosting it refers to such debasements as bestiality, incest, rape, and child pornography. Any site that promotes these items (and doesn’t get shut down by the feds) is probably faking. If the booming market in the perverse is simply too much for you to ignore, however, and you decide to dare to host an adult site promoting these elements, merely make sure you fake it too.
One test commonly used to decide a site’s obscenity, according to law, is the Miller Test, which states that if a website (or periodical, etc.) taken as a entire is found to be entirely lacking in artistic, scientific, literary, or cultural merit, as per the local community’s mores, it is deemed “obscene”. The ideal way to avoid your adult site from getting red flagged this way is to include non-adult content somewhere (preferably on more than a few pages) in your site. Think of Playboy, with its articles on politics and such. The bonus is, you can use this material to promote your adult site to a broader audience.
A federal law that all U.S. adult sites must abide by is 18 U.S.C. 2257, which states that records documenting the legal age verification of all model depicted in a manner that is considered sexually explicit must be kept. No models under 18 yrs of age can appear in such a manner, nor can models over 18 yrs of age if they are unable to provide duplicates of adequate age verification documents.
And this doesn’t only apply to models you shoot with your own photographers. This applies to any stock footage you use as well. Do not assume that another website with pictures you’d like to use has done their due diligence. You must always do your own.
Your website’s landing page, or at least a preliminary webpage visitors to your site will view before being granted entry the restricted, adult-content areas, must be a “Warning Page” that acts as a disclaimer stating that “this site contains adult material and ought not be viewed by anyone under 21 yrs of age”. On this Warning Page it must also say clear that if viewing adult material is illegal in the say in which your visitors reside then they ought not enter your website.
That having been said, you are still not freed from the responsibility of keeping minors from seeing the adult content in your site. It merely shows that you have put forth the minimal good faith effort to keep them out. If you were to get prosecuted for allowing minors to view the adult content on your site, a Warning Page by itself is a shoddy defense.
How you take matters into your own hands is with an Age Verification System (AVS), which you must provide as a gateway for visitors wishing to enter your website. The logic behind an AVS is weak at ideal — presuming that simply because someone has a credit card in their name, they are probably over 18 — but it’s all we have got at the moment. What more can you do? If you can hire your own personal (or company) lawyer, all the better. Otherwise, we advocate having your site hosted by a web hosting provider that advertises its support for adult websites and maybe even offers tools (like an AVS) to help you to improved run yours. Look around. They are out there.
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