Lew Payne: Taking Online Hosting and Publishing to the Next Level
Porn surfers are an unappreciative lot. Every day, millions of surfers scour the Web in search of porn, never giving a second thought to where the content they view is from, or how it reached their hard drive.
If porn surfers were a little more tech-savvy, perhaps they might come to appreciate the work of people behind the scenes making the delivery of their porn possible - people like Lew Payne.
While his name won't ring a bell with porn surfers, a good chunk of them would likely recognize the site Lew Payne is best known for: Persian Kitty's Adult Links. Persiankitty.com is one of the oldest and most popular link lists on the Internet, pulling in more than half a million visitors a day.
But aside from running a link list, Payne and his company, Lew Payne Publishing Inc. (LPPI), are involved in a number of other ventures. For example, LPPI recently struck a deal to manage all the online assets of Princeton Media Group, publisher of close to 25 adult entertainment and lifestyle publications, including Gent and Oui Magazines. And if that wasn't enough, Persian Kitty has also completed a trademark licensing deal with Penthouse to feature their models as the "Persian Kitty Penthouse Pet of the Week" in return for banner ads and links to Persian Kitty.
Oh, and did we mention LPPI hosts some of the Internet's biggest adult sites, too?
The fact that LPPI has its hands in a number of different online ventures wouldn't surprise anyone who knows Payne and his long history with computers. Payne first got involved in 1980, when he was a student at the University of Southern California. That's also when he first got acquainted with the Internet. "I was on ARPANET, as well as the MIT-AI, MIT-MC, and SAIL machines back then," he says. "We used LA36 DECwriter terminals, with Anderson-Jacobson 300 baud acoustic couplers. There were no PCs, and no World Wide Web back then... only telnet and FTP locations."
After USC, Payne moved on to work for what would eventually become a Fortune 500 company, working initially as a contract programmer specializing in software platform migrations. "I soon became a full-time employee, and embarked on a long mission of rewriting all their applications to support true multi-user, multi-location inventory control, order entry, accounts receivable, purchasing, bill of materials, and manufacturing systems," he says. After fourteen years with the company, however, Payne says he slowly found his "software, hardware and network skills being called up in a radically different arena - that of the adult online world." In 1994, Payne launched Persian Kitty's Adult Links, which quickly became wildly popular. Payne quickly he found he was helping his ISP expand and move offices, thanks largely in part to Persian Kitty's traffic growth. He soon become closely involved in the Web hosting business, and hasn't looked back since.
But unless you were actively seeking out Lew Payne to handle the technical requirements of your adult site, you wouldn't be likely to find him actively promoting his business somewhere in cyberspace. You also wouldn't be able to gather how much industry experience he really has. LPPI's Web site, for example, is a one-page site promoting a company dedicated to "serving some of your needs, most of the time" and providing services like "Unix shit, including FreeBSD". Even Payne's description of the company is generic - he says the company provides "specialized programming and technical consulting to business."
Despite the company's low-key approach to marketing, LPPI has a history of handling some pretty significant technical tasks. "Some of our technical achievements include the automation and integration of DNS administration for a client with more than 85,000 domain names, and the design, implementation and operation of a USENET news router - currently listed as number two with Best Internet," he says. LPPI also introduced "the first heavy-duty banner rotation system," which Payne says was first used by Persian Kitty five years ago.
As a hosting company, LPPI is connected to the max, sharing an office building in Palo Alto with ISP ViaNet Communications. This allows LPPI exclusive access to fiber networks that are connected to PAIX/CIX, MAE-WEST, MAE-EAST, PacBell NAP, AOL TeraPOP, "making immediate access to the servers and exceptional emergency response possible," Payne says.
A number of heavy hitters make use of LPPI's hosting services and skills, including adult mega-portal Sex.com, who recruited Payne's expertise last year after Gary Kremen, the rightful owner of the domain name, reclaimed it from Stephen Michael Cohen, who had stolen it a number of years ago.
It was during the Sex.com legal proceedings that Payne actually first met the team at Sex.com, as Cohen was trying to sue Payne over trademark issues. "At that time, I had heard that Gary Kremen was fighting Cohen on rightful ownership of Sex.com, which would have legal ramifications on our trademark challenge," he says. The two shared discovery evidence, and both Payne and Kremen were eventually successful. Once Kremen got the domain back, he recruited Payne to provide hosting and consulting services for the portal.
While porn surfers are unlikely to care that Payne can offer a wide roster of services backed by an unprecedented amount of industry experience, those inside the industry know exactly what he can do and often make use of LPPI as a result. And Payne is always up for the challenge. "We can, and often do, make the impossible happen," he says.
