On a different subject, some time ago I’ve made a post regarding Cirtex servers. After some careful and thorough testing, I retire what I said. I mean, they’re really cheap, BUT they’re quite bad as well. And their “support” is a joke, so better avoid them

CLICK TO GET YOUR WINDOWS SERVER NOW!

btw, if you’re looking for top of the crop UNIX servers, don’t hesitate in trying Amerinoc. We’re running some resource intensive sites on their MVPS1 plan and so far their servers are proving to be way better than many GOOD dedicated boxes for less than 20% of the price!

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR NEW UNIX SERVER NOW!

Just so you drool, here’s a short brief: Upload a folder with the name you want for the post which includes the desired video. Done. Our script will create 3 different video versions, automatically create a post, assign to a category, display the correct video based on device, interlink with pre-installed credit card processing, define content dripping based on subscription time and type of membership, create rotating thumbnails ………… ufff! Too much to tell. But the beauty of this is the following: the whole process took 1 (one) click. The video conversion to 3 different extension x 2 sizes (web and iPod) takes around 3 minutes. I dare you to find something faster, easier and smarter than this!

Interested? Click here for cheap FFMPEG hosting, after all, what do you have to lose?

and yes, it allows adult content, after all this is an adult site!

WARNING: ALTHOUGH THE PRICE IS CHEAP, THEIR SERVICE IS PRETTY BAD, SO BE CAREFUL

btw, if you’re looking for top of the crop UNIX servers, don’t hesitate in trying Amerinoc. We’re running some resource intensive sites on their MVPS1 plan and so far their servers are proving to be way better than many GOOD dedicated boxes for less than 20% of the price!

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR NEW UNIX SERVER NOW!

So, we were working on this site, for which we did an ultra customized site working on WPMU engine. The ultra customized part isn’t really important, the thing is you’ll need to use WPMU or WP 3.x Multisite (see some instructions on how to do it here). This site was a full community setup which communicated in real time with tube section users (it was Mechbunny‘s script which we had to customize for this), webcams, dating and such. Of course, an adult site. And of course, we offered space for blogs for community members.

So, what happened? After 2-3 days, I started noticing most users were spammers creating non-adult pages selling any kind of mainstream product you could think of. At first, we deleted them at sight. Then, we simply killed them with an auto-ban script we wrote. But then I was checking stats and noticed many of those pages were having traffic. Nothing important, but anything from 10 to 50 unique visitors a day. So I took down the auto-ban script and analyzed the traffic, tendencies, results and everything I could measure. And then I noticed this: these spammers were helping this site ENORMOUSLY. We got loads of pages listed, we got a PR3 in 2 months and mainly we got traffic to our main page. 2, 3, 5, 10 unique hits a day, which multiplied by 1000s of pages added up to a pretty nifty amount of traffic…. FOR FREE!

Furthermore, these spammers were ranking high for long tail keywords, so I simply build a few special themes with nice headers/footers and auto-included the latest posts of the MAIN PAGE into their themes and the latest videos in the tube section were added in the footer. Ka-Boom! we went 0 to 20000 unique visitors a day without buying a single hit, 100% organic.

The best part is that those spammers work on a linkwheel scenario, so we had traffic and links coming from many sources and IPs. A win-win situation that only required a good server (which we had) and a simple straight-forward change of philosophy: instead of killing the spammers, let the spammers work for us.

Of course, I assume you can imagine further scenarios, like letting them build the traffic and then redirect everything to your main page, or even visiting their sponsors and change links to yours. As long as they are breaking your TOS, you can do whatever you want. But be careful: maybe being greedy will hurt you more than what it will help you, try to research the traffic and if they’re providing you with good decent traffic, maybe you should let them do what they want. As I said, it’s a change of philosophy and a win-win situation, so, why fix what is working?

Anyway, just try it and lmk how it worked for you!

Coda: you may ask yourself what happened to this site. Well, I can’t provide any info on it since we’re on a process to get all the money we’re owed due to a middle man who screwed both us and the site owner.

From:	Christopher Mallick, Owner, ePas
To:	xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Received:	Sep 4, 2010 11:00 PM PDT
Subject:	Important – ePassporte Visa Electron/Virtual Card Suspended
	Dear ePassporte Account Holders, Please be advised that, at 12:00 PM PDT today, September 2, 2010, we were notified that effective immediately, Visa International has suspended our banking partner’s (St. Kitts Nevis Anguilla National Bank) ePassporte Visa program. The ePassporte e-Wallet program continues to be up and running, except funds cannot be transferred between your Visa Account and your e-Wallet. At this time ePassporte can no longer issue Visa Cards, and the ability for our Account Holders to make point of sale purchases and withdraw funds from ATMs has also been suspended. At this time we do not know why this drastic action was taken by Visa. To us, it is unconscionable that such action would be taken without the opportunity for ePassporte to fully understand Visa’s reasons and to be able to take all steps necessary to keep our program running the way it has so successfully done for over 7 years. But that is what Visa has done. As soon as we have more information we will be in contact with you. In the meantime please be assured that your funds are safe. We are very sorry for the short notice and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. The ePassporte team is working diligently to rectify this situation. We kindly ask you to bear with us while we work through this issue. Please feel free to contact us via the message center or at our call center, should you have any questions, comments or concerns. Thank You, Christopher Mallick

These are very bad news and many people is awaiting for news on the subject, which are supposed to come on Wednesday September 8th. Therefore, we’re no longer accepting Epassporte at least until the situation is clear.

In the meanwhile, if you’re looking for an extremely reliable alternative payment method, please check out this one. (yeah, I know this is spammy but believe me, you won’t regret it )

UPDATE: As of today, Epassporte seems to be gone for good, they posted the following message in their website:

IMPORTANT MESSAGE REGARDING YOUR EPASSPORTE ACCOUNT

Dear ePassporte Account Holders,

St. Kitts Nevis Anguilla National Bank, without our prior knowledge, has turned off the ability for ePassporte to access or display Account Holders’ Visa Card balances. This means that when you login to your ePassporte Account, you will only be able to see your Wallet balance. As a consequence, inquiries regarding your Visa Card balance must be directed to St. Kitts Nevis Anguilla National Bank. St Kitts Bank is responsible for all funds on Visa Cards. Their contact information is as follows:

St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank Ltd.

Central Street,
P.O. Box 343
Basseterre, St. Kitts, West Indies

Tel: (869) 465-2204    Mon – Thurs: 8 a.m. – 2 p.m. Fri: 8 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Fax: (869) 465-1050
Email: webmaster@sknanb.com

ePassporte will continue to provide support with regard to the funds in your Wallet. We kindly ask for your patience as we must verify Accounts and balances manually.

Thank You,

ePassporte Account Holder Services

so well, I think we can call it THE END

As yo may imagine, we designed everything on it, but we also are in charge of marketing, development, content creation and every single aspect of it. And this is just one of the many projects we’re working on our own where we take over all aspects of the business, and quite frankly, as big as it sounds, this one isn’t the bigger we’re working on!

Hope you like it, any comments are more than appreciated!

WP E-commerce

This plugin is simply amazing. And free. It does most of what other paid plugins do, only that better and for free. Now, be aware I said MOST, not EVERYTHING. The only con we could find is that it’s not very good for membership sites, but it’s aimed to goods and/or services. It will require a paid module (only $25) but really not as good as the rest of the plugin. All in all, I love my WP E-commerce!

Rating: 9/10

Quick Shop

I think it was the first decent WP membership plugin, so hats off to that. Other than that, there are way better options, and add to that documentation is close to none… just forget it.

Rating:3/10

Amember

It promises too much, but once you check what they deliver, you’ll realize you got the same any Credit Card processor would give you… for free. Documentation is OK, they install it for you (tricky, tricky), but too expensive to get nothing. Yes, I said NOTHING. If you want to use it with WordPress, you’ll have to pay even more, and the WordPress module is probably the poorest of all plugins commented in this post.

Rating: 3/10

WP-Members

Pretty cheap, reliable and extremely easy to use plugin. However, not useful for adult sites since it only uses Paypal. But if you’re going to use it for a mainstream site or you need to charge via Paypal, look no further, it really does the work, and it does it very well. One con: the programmers of this script don’t care at all about look and they get to the extreme of using 4 (four) style sheets for the registration/login page, so you may need to do some work (such as editing php and/or using a lot of !important calls in your style sheet to make sure you override WP defaults)

Rating: 7/10

Magic Members

Although it needs some work and polish, it’s my favorite. Not as easy and intuitive as WP-Members but still easy, more complete AND you can use many payment options, including Paypal and different credit cards processors. Plus, if your credit card processing company isn’t listed, you can request them to add it.

NOTE: As of August 28th, Magic Members has announced the addition of 4 new payment gateways

We wanted to send you a quick note about the new features of the Magic Member plugin.
We integrated Magic Members with new payment gateways:

CCBill
2CheckOut
PayPal Pro
Manuel Pay (Wire Transfer/eCheck)

Rating: 8.5/10

In recap, when it comes to WordPress Membership plugins, there are no many options, and if it’s to sell access to sites, I’d basically use the last 2 I mentioned until something better comes out, and if it is to sell goods, services or to install on E-shop CMS, Wp E-commerce is the answer.

The above being said, all plugins still need some work, whether on its visual aspects or back end. Besides, there’s not a single plugin useful for everything and covering adult and mainstream. It simply doesn’t exist, so it’s time to do it… any developer on to the task?

Maybe. At least as you know it.

We’re on the verge of great changes happening very soon, so be sure to check this site the next following days/weeks. For now, we’ll be finishing the already committed projects for our adult website design area, and from there we’ll see how we work things out with the new crew. However, if we feel we can’t provide our usual level of satisfaction, we’d rather close business to new clients to concentrate only on the marketing side of our company and a few mega projects we’re working on. This being said, we’ll continue accepting mainstream design projects.

We think our expertise and results have grown to a level where it would be quite unfair for our clients not to be able to provide the same or even better service, and share our expertise at the ridiculously low prices w’re charging.  At the same time it would be unfair for new clients not to provide them with the best possible service as well. Due to our geometric growth, we’re close to that point. As a matter of fact, we’re working extra hours right now and hiring more people to help us.

This is a time for well thought steps. I’m sure we’ll make the correct decision, one that may leave further clients out of the scoop, but will satisfy our existing clients. Which, as we’re at it, are the biggest companies in adult internet business.

For those of you wondering or anyone who has any doubt, you know how to contact us. We won’t let anyone down. We’re just growing too fast for what I feel we can handle without adding a bunch of highly trained personnel. For that, you’d be thankful, it will be on your own benefit