Hi all!
New on this board, not new in the industry. I'm John Adams, a male performer, producer and director for 10 years now, based in Europe.
I've worked a lot for other publishers, but in the past 6 years we've also shot a nice amount of scenes I own all the rights of. We sell quite nicely through some clipsites but a year ago we decided we are going to focus more on creating series (instead of just shooting what we came into our minds) and right now we are focusing on creating 5 brands.
So far, so good.
Since I've owned a hosting company (mainstream) in the past and in my other life am a consultant for cloud and data centers and large hosting migrations, I know a thing or two about owning and maintaining your own servers.
So when I came to the choice of selecting a member-ship system (we want to create membership sites, and perhaps one VOD / Download-to-own site for some misc content) we first looked at systems that we could install on our own servers. In the end we came at xMember, which we purchased and unfortunately have not been able to get it running ever since. Regrettably, because it looked nice, but it's the most poorly documented piece of software I have ever come across and creating tickets with their support-department haven't resolved anything.
Although we still will look to get it running, all of the problems so far have made me decided not to use this software at launch, just because I don't feel like we could easily solve problems with this software if we would be running production and that seems like a very bad idea with a membership site.
So, we are now re-orienting on software, this time considering hosted as well, since these sites must be running, even when I'm shooting content and not able to repair things immediately if needed.
So far I found:
- PornCMS
- ElevatedX
- Mechbunny
- KVS
- ClickcastX
- Due to security reasons I'm not considering Wordpress-solutions.
I would like you guys to ask what are your customers-experiences with the systems mentioned above?
Some things we do find important:
- Attractive build in design (responsive for mobile as well)
- Lighting fast (of course, visitors don't like waiting)
- Good streaming/download speeds (nobody likes hiccups in their 'viewing' experience
)
- Easy-to-use
- Affordable
- In the end, we will have multiple sites running, would be nice if we could control them from one environment (but I don't mean alias-sites, I mean through multi-sites, as in different sites/content/design).
A long introduction, but looking forward to your advice and (most important) own experiences with software/systems etc.
Thanks upfront!
Cheers, John