Introduction and CMS question
 

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

If you have any questions regarding Mechbunny, please feel free to email me at [email protected]

Hey John, another John here :) Perhaps we can chat when you have a moment. We are well documented and our support team is second to none, not to mention NATS is the preferred platform in paysite operation.

I didn't catch your contact info, but mine is in my sig. Let's schedule something soon

I was wondering why you're not considering Wordpress for security reasons. There are established plugins like Wordfence that help to keep WP sites very secure so I think it would be your most economical platform to start. I would only go with one of the dedicated CMS products you mentioned if you are VERY confident your site will make lots of money to start.

:thumbsup

Welcome to GFY John. ElevatedX and Mechbunny are the only CMS we recommend at Zuzana Designs. John at NATS is someone you will want to talk to as well. Good luck with your new project. If you ever have any design needs or questions please feel free to contact me. We've developed, designed, managed and ran several paysite programs over the years.

Thanks all for the warm welcome and your responses so far! Keep them coming!

Well, I know Wordfence and it's actually very good. The problem is that Wordpress is the most used CMS system in the world and therefor a very interesting target for hackers. So, what's secure today, won't be secure-by-default tomorrow. With an adult site that's more risky, since we do have content online, membership information etc, making it a target for hackers anyway. That's the reason why I exclude Wordpress on my shortlist.

@Neighbor: thanks, I will look into your solution and contact you.

@k0nr4d: thanks, I will contact you (again, I think we already spoke around August).

@Zuzana Designs: Thanks for your insight! Can we talk (in PM) about the reasons you have for your advice?

[QUOTE=JohnAdams;22563431]Thanks all for the warm welcome and your responses so far! Keep them coming!

@Neighbor: thanks, I will look into your solution and contact you.

When you are ready to review NATS in a demo, for certain let me know and we will get you scheduled.

BTW: I just checked your website, and I'm redirected to some buytraffic site that tries to trick me into accepting notifications from them.... Is this your site or is something going on?

[QUOTE=Neighbor;22563439]Thanks! But as far as I know NATS is an affiliate software suite right? I want to start with a content management system first, affiliate software is for a later moment.

[QUOTE=JohnAdams;22563444]NATS is partially affiliate software, so you are correct in saying that...but it is much more with over 100 integrated billing solutions, membership management, data tracking and a whole plethora of additional tools to help you manage the business.

We can discuss in more detail on a call, but there are many more benefits and offering of NATS aside from the obvious affiliate system.

Over 15 years the platform has expanded tremendously and we recently released our latest version, NATS 5, making operations more streamlined.

You can also checkout https://www.adultscriptpro.com. With our Premium Membership you can create a paysite (with trailers and everything required to attract members). Some features that other scripts dont have are HLS/M3U8, complex community part (comments with replies, activity feeds, profile posts like pornhub...). I also have 2 new templates in the making (one i can already show demo) which get you 100 score on google pagespeed.

This looks interesting! How customizable is your script? Could it handle 100+ paysites all connected together in one massive network? :)

Our host just resolved the issue. Feel free to send me an email to sarah [at] zuzanadesigns.com anytime.

You get the FULL source code so you can modify anything you want. Its coded using classes, modules, components, separate template stuff...so its easy to modify and maintain.

As for being able to handle 100+ paysites, i guess it depends on the traffic, i have clients with more than 1 million visitors daily, so depending on the traffic those 100 sites have i think it can handle 100+ paysites! This also depends on the hardware, but what i can tell you 100% is that on a 500$/month dedicated server it can hold 1 million+ visitors daily.

I also plan on adding more paysite related features in the near future!

Nice! I realize it's mostly a tube script but could perhaps be modified to serve paysite content. The traffic would be relatively minimal (a few thousand Members) so it would really just need these features:

Updates displayed well
Rotating content
Streaming and downloading capabilities
search function
display updates etc from various websites
Display upsells

:)

I plan on building a paysite script only so if you could go into details about each point it would help me with the development.

1. Updates displayed well? Is this about content updates? (if yes this can be done via shedule or shedule queue, like you setup to publish 1 video every hour...)

2. I've added support for CTR in version 3.x so you can display content based on the daily CTR for example...but yeah if you give me more details how you want this to work, i will implement in the future.

3. The most secure streaming/download method is done through php via apache/nginx using X-Sendfile/X-Accel-Redirect. I have implemented this in my script for both mp4 and hls. This way you can prevent hotlinking and stealing and even downloading if done correctly (however someone can always record the entire screen in full screen mode and yeah there you go....).

4. I guess the easiest method to do this would be if all paysites could be managed from the same administration panel...so displaying content from other paysites would be easy. Until this function is being implemented you could use a simple REST api...

5. So this is like displaying better offers? I guess this is more a design thing...

Once i start working on my adult paysite script i will post on this forum for more ideas!

Welcome to the zoo . . .

:2 cents::2 cents::2 cents::2 cents:

Excellent man! Keep us informed as you go along. What you have now looks great. Really clean design, easy navigation. Good luck. :)

:thumbsup

:thumbsup

It's not wordpress itself that is insecure, it's the thousand plugins for it that no one checks. In my experience it's not if a wp site gets hacked - it's when. On top of that, you won't even receive the goddamn common courtesy of a human being hacking your website - it'll be a bot doing it :1orglaugh

PornCMS is the only way to go.

these days EVERY site and server is attacked 24/7. We block over 100k attacks a day including DDOS daily. all accounts include hosting on our private cloud network of over 50 servers. your videos can be served from up to a dozen servers some days depending on demand. who else offers that starting at $95/month all inclusive?

i've been actively developing and supporting PornCMS for over a decade. most of these other cms don't even update anymore. my clients make a profit and i'm not going anywhere. this is who i am:

Best Programmer in the Adult Industry :pimp

#porncms

Welcome to the board John.

Use ElevatedX as your CMS until you can make your own.

Use NATS as your member management and sales tool.

Those are the best options for you starting out. Hands down. You'll need at least two servers: one for the CMS, and one for NATS. ElevatedX will be mostly pain-free. Prepare for a steep learning curve with NATS, but it's worth it, and NATS John is always helpful.

My experience: Twistys, Femjoy, Badoink, BLACKED, TUSHY, VIXEN. And I've tried wordpress, amember, and other solutions.

Good luck.

Thanks for your reply. I already requested a demo last Friday and last Monday through your company-website, so looking forward to an response...

Thanks! Since I'm new to this part of the business: Why do we need NATS? I expect member management to be present in the CMS and I thought NATS is doing mostly affiliate management, but please understand that for a newbie like me, that might be unclear :)

Did you implement elevatedX on the Vixen-sites?

Great advice :thumbsup

This can be a long discussion, but a CMS is content management, so it handles what type of content the user has access to, eg. gold, silver, trial, pay per view.
NATS would handle HOW the user is billed and how much money you make (what each member is worth, which countries perform the best, etc).

For example, user is from Germany:
NATS gives him euro price, and sends him to correct biller. Tells the CMS - hey, this guy bought this certain access level and paid.
CMS then knows what to show him. Doesn't have to worry about tracking where he is from or the money.

Additionally, the majority of your sales will be type-ins/direct, BUT that traffic is generated by promoting your content on sites like tubes, which will only promote your content, if they can get a small chance of earning a sale. They require affiliate sales tracking and NATS is the best game in town.

You don't need NATS. If you use a biller like CCbill and Verotel.com, they come with affiliate tracking. But their systems are very basic, and you'll want to be able to use other IPSPs such as Epoch, which offer paypal subscriptions and granular control of the billing.

No. They built it in-house. I've mostly worked with in-house solutions and do not recommend it at all for someone starting out who isn't a developer.

We have many customers who are quite happy with either of the 3:
- ElevatedX
- MechBunny
- KVS (though this one mainly free sites, I haven't yet seen a paysite using it, the monetization feature is relatively new)

Thanks! Now I understand the sense of using of NATS more!

Hi John,

We host more instances of these software products that serve our industry than anyone else. Please feel free to call and chat with myself or Natalie to learn about the pros and cons of all the available options. If you’re keen on value and turnkey integrations with CDN and cloud storage as you’re a technologist yourself, the new Mechbunny integration with MojoCloud and MojoCDN that hasn’t been announced yet is fabulous... We have very happy customers on MB, EX and newly a few on KVS which is similarly integrated.

Brad

:error

excluding PornCMS, as Brad doesn't have any first-hand knowledge or experience with our software. Mojo doesn't host any PornCMS "instances" because we include private cloud hosting and "CDN" with every account, starting at $95 a month, all features enabled, no hidden fees, no extra charge to process videos, plug-and-play, launch in days.

just keeping this thread honest. there's already a lot of vendors who don't own sites pushing software they don't use.

of course, if you DO want to invest in our very overpriced and outdated cms competitors, or need to host NATS or MPA3, Brad can help you with hosting, as its not included by any competitor. Mojo is decent hosting (i do have first-hand knowledge), but of course Brad earns no benefit recommending PornCMS.

:2 cents:

#porncms

Maybe you should move your hosting! You’re a software company, not a web host. It’s unreasonable for me to vouch for a proprietary software product that is hosted somewhere else that the software provider doesn’t control or manage the infrastructure for. I’m sure we could save you money and improve performance and reliability, if given the opportunity. This would help you grow your business by default of being able to rest on our reputation for quality. Furthermore, if we are working together and we are certain the product is great, you would surely be receiving clients recommended by us. My door is always open for conversation. There is enough business out there for everyone and competition spurs innovation, I always welcome this to our industry. Have a great day!

Brad

the problem, Sir Brad, is you base this evaluation solely on wanting more business. you don't know anything about our business, our offering, our servers, or our clients.

PornCMS is deeply integrated into the several dozen servers its hosted on. They are all stripped down and optimized specifically to run the cms efficiently and safely. Our servers talk to each other continuously to serve content and protect against the constant barrage of hackers. You won't even give your clients root access and your idea of security is a firewall script.

if we were to move over 50 servers to you, we would have to charge at least triple. for no reason at all, other than to fund your round the world party trips :1orglaugh

so yea man, no.

:pimp

#

You should send me your hosting and CDN invoices, I'm certain you'd be impressed with my proposal. You're making a lot of incorrect assumptions and none of them are productive... You're treating us as an adversary, when in fact there is significantly more opportunity for us to work together. We provide excellent service, retail and wholesale, for more than a thousand companies across thousands of servers. Your worst case scenario is you can come back to GFY and have bragging rights if my offer isn't compelling. The best case is that we can save you thousands or tens of thousands, annually. Take me to bat on this, I won't share any of what we discuss!

Sincerely,

Brad

:1orglaugh :laughing- :1orglaugh

holy shit that was funny. thanks for the afternoon laugh, man!

:1orglaugh

#

Your customers would be making a lot more money if they weren't hosted on Hetzner and this would be better for your business. Their network quality isn't up to par. Again, you're making an assumption that we can't offer equivalent or better services with an offer that makes financial sense for you. Furthermore, what is most certainly a lower specification for the bulk of your 50 servers could be optimized with faster and better hardware.

Beethoven said that it's better to hit the wrong note confidently, than hit the right note unconfidently. Never be afraid to be wrong or to embarrass yourself; we are all students in this life, and there is always something more to learn.

Brad

more baseless assumptions..

i've seen your pricing, i have active dev clients using your hosting, and i know a lot more about what you offer than you know about what i offer.

stop trying to sell me your hosting, Brad. i don't need it or want it lol

:thumbsup

#

Excellent new CMS options from MechBunny and MojoHost, found here:

https://www.mechbunny.com/hosting

The Press Release: https://www.ynot.com/mojohost-mechbunny-alliance/

MICHIGAN – Web hosting services provider MojoHost and software development company Mechbunny have announced a new partnership that will “power adult websites into the future,” the companies said in a statement released Thursday evening.

“For the first time, MojoHost and Mechbunny are providing a fully scalable software solution that reduces the cost barriers to entry for new publishers wishing to launch adult video tube sites,” the companies said in their statement. “The new technology partnership ends the need for long-term contracts or expensive hardware to get started in the adult industry as a publisher. Combined, they are making entering the adult industry affordable again for new players.”

In the announcement, Mechbunny noted that will the license price is not changing for clients purchasing directly from Mechbunny, when customers bundle their site hosting and Mechbunny license through MojoHost, “their price will be discounted to $220 USD instead of 399 Euro,” which the company said is “effectively a 50% savings while adding significant value.” The bundled packages are available to new and existing clients of Mechbunny.

“We have never done a fully integrated partnership like this before,” said Konrad Piwowar, CEO of Mechbunny. “It is really exciting to solidify our alignment with MojoHost finally. We have referred clients to Brad for many years now, but this partnership takes that to a whole new level.”

In the announcement, the companies noted that in recent years, MojoHost has “aggressively expanded into technology supportive of its core hosting services, such as MojoCDN for content distribution, and MojoCloud for scalability through cloud hosting,” adding that it is those two technologies, paired with Mechbunny’s software that “are the foundation of this groundbreaking offering.”

“Infinite scalability (and mega cost savings) exist in the marriage between MojoCloud’s low-cost cloud storage, combined with MojoCDN content distribution,” said MojoHost Founder and CEO Brad Mitchell. “These two technologies often are the most significant cost factors for the launch and operation of any video-based website.”

The announcement calls out the fact that other web hosting companies often “force publishers into non-scaling, incremental packages that are cost-prohibitive,” adding that such packages are “not required at MojoHost and make it attractive for publishers using alternative software to switch to Mechbunny.”

“The Mechbunny and MojoHost solution are closer to a pay as you go offering, with no contracts,” Mitchell added. “So, it’s about both great infrastructure and profitable scalability.”

The introductory offer for a bundle is $49 per month. The bundle includes unlimited Mechbunny domains, free setup and support, a fully managed virtual private server, 500GB MojoCloud storage, and over 10 terabytes of bandwidth including service from MojoCDN. Storage and bandwidth are fully scalable based on additional usage. Additional packages are available at $99/month and $199/month that include servers with higher processing power, storage, and bandwidth. All packages are viewable at Mechbunny Hosting

For more information on MojoHost and the services offered by the company, visit MojoHost.com. For more information on Mechbunny’s software products and custom development services, visit Mechbunny.com.


Please let us know if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Brad

100% agree with this.

Over the years I've worked on sites that use a number of diffrent setups and found that for the most part ElevatedX + NATs combination stands the test of time.
There is a learning curve and I would suggest talking to "Zuzana Designs" - She posted above - they do great work with designing tours, members areas and landing pages.

Welcome to GFY John :thumbsup

Hi plsureking
I've not used your system, but since my post above I have taken a quick look at the marketing and info on your site as well as looked at a few sites using your system.
I have a few questions. I assume from what I can see that the system is a WYSIWYG engine with predefined templates. (based on twitter bootstrap and fontawsome)

- What exactly is your included Marketing Labor?
"Have our experts send out a newsletter, request site reviews, or review your SEO."

- I see that you upsell programming services in Monthly Service Plans.
Does the site owner get direct access to their soites code base? Or are they bound to using the support and service plan to get changes, tweaks, join pages etc worked on.
As I also see a cost of $699 for bootstrap template instalation. (+299 if the design is PSD based) Limited to 10 hours work and done in 3-5 weeks.
http://free.porncms.com/PornCMSDesignServicesTerms.pdf
So if I want to add a new tour it will cost me the cost of design plus a minium of $699 and take 3-5 weeks to have it applied?
- Is there a design outline that a designer can follow so that the design can be directly applied?

- What is your "trailer player widget" upgrade, I assume the $99 cost is one time and per site?
The demo link is broken : http://tp2.porncms.com/

- Hosting costs - What is the base hosting allocation? I see that upgrading to : 1TB Disk Space, 15TB Download Limit is $150/month.
Can you tell me if there are other resource alocations (CPU cores, RAM etc)
As per terms of service says "Annual Hosted plans include 130Gb of disk space and allow unlimited downloads per month"
https://www.porncms.com/cloud.php#terms
Also confused by the unlimited support for $25 when reading the support plans starting at $299 a month https://www.porncms.com/service.php

- I assume the HTTPS upgrade is free as it uses Lets Encript X3, can clients opt to use their own SSL?
Note: You may wish to test your SSL - - up as some issues where found using https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html
Example: No SNI support. (SSL 3 Insecure)

A quick security scan also shows insecure HTTP cookies for "shovid" and "PHPSESSID" on all sites tested.
https://blog.dareboost.com/en/2016/1...ttponly-flags/

Also Missing HTTP security headers
X-Frame-Options - - Protects against Clickjacking attacks - - Not Set
X-XSS-Protection - - Mitigates Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks - - Not Set
Strict-Transport-Security - - Protects against man-in-the-middle attacks - - Not Set
X-Content-Type-Options Prevents possible phishing or XSS attacks Not Set

I did not do a deep dive on security but I can do a full pen test if you would like as you mentioned security "hackers" both in this thread and a number of times on your site.

Anyways you as for member managment and payment gateways. Do you have a member managment system? Or affiliate tracking system?
I did not see an indication of this on your site and the few sites I tested that are on your system seem to be using CCBill for this.
Is anyone using NATs?
If you do have a member managment system, is it possible to migrate the users to NATs or other system?
Speaking of migration what happens when or if a client of yours wishes to migrate to a new service and or host?

Lastly is it a requirment to allow you to market a site on https://www.dailynudesblog.com/ or is this an add on feature?

Thanks for the kind words PAR :) We've worked with ElevatedX and NATS for many years. They are both great companies that understand the clients needs.

we can do pre-sales in an email or chat if you'd like. otherwise i'll spend too much time dicking around on gfy lol

i need to go over your list too. some of those things you listed are 5-10 years old.

generally speaking, porncms is a solid system right out of the box for a startup or early stage growth paysite. its fast enough, secure enough, and has capacity for some nice traffic and membership.

the sites that make it up to the stable growth stage will eventually order customizations or do them in-house. that will help them get up to the next level. design work is pretty easy for a low level coder and/or bootstrap/html designer. you're either clicking menu buttons (colors, sliders, artwork) or tweaking css, bootstrap or php.

there's really not much else to it. if you want to slap a paysite up quick and have some solid tech behind it - cheap - porncms is an option. i've never had to push it very hard and the cms is over a decade old. there's no trickery or slickness, but there's probably some outdated docs and info. i spend a lot of time every day answering emails and sharing advice. sales and marketing take a pretty far backseat to client growth.

the network has a solid first-string lineup making decent traffic and sales every day. i think John plans to get up to that first-string :thumbsup

#porncms

Welcome to GFY John.

ElevatedX + NATS + Mojohost is what you need. :)