Wild Cherry’s Adult Network certainly started innocently enough. In 1993, it purchased a couple of UK servers and the bright idea of hosting adult Web sites.
"Wild Cherry was first conceived with the realization in mind that adult sites had absolutely no allies when it came to finding a host," says Christine Murraine, administrator and half owner of Wild Cherry.
"Prices were high, support was minimal, and it was difficult to find a host that was willing to take on adult sites. Within one week of entering the search engines those two servers were both full," says Murraine, "and we’ve been adding servers ever since!"
On an average day, Wild Cherry transfers about 180 gigs of data through a little over 700 clients. Its longevity is indicative of a level of understanding and interest, in both the Web hosting business and the adult industry--something a lot of younger hosts don’t have. Murraine herself has been involved in the adult business since 1991.
Committed to customer care, Wild Cherry employs a technical staff of fully qualified and trained industry veterans, available by phone 24/7 at Wild Cherry’s toll free support number, or via email. The support staff works with webmasters to help them install security software to prevent other sites from stealing bandwidth by linking to images. They also help to set up automated member protection packages for pay sites.
Wild Cherry doesn’t dabble in things like design or content. It sticks to doing one thing, and doing it right. Putting hosting first has given Wild Cherry the opportunity to develop an uncommon level of expertise.
Like any good host, Wild Cherry treats its equipment carefully. "We like to keep our servers at or below 30 percent CPU usage, and 75 percent memory usage." Says Murraine. "Depending on the server and the amount of traffic, some of our machines can have 125 domains on them, but 125 is the maximum. Connection speed, number of pages served, bandwidth usage, transfer rate, how many drives a server has, ping times and trace route from different ping points, all determine how a server will be managed and therefore how many sites each will host."
Staffed 24/7, all of Wild Cherry’s network centers are secure. Wild Cherry performs background checks on its entire staff to prevent hiring sex criminals or convicted hackers.
"We’ve gone the extra step to ensure that all our systems are not only redundant, but also housed with diverse fiber entrances and isolated power distribution to give our customers the utmost in security and reliability," says Murraine.
"In addition to our main NOC we have chosen to co-locate servers in different locations for redundancy, networking speed, security and safety reasons,” says Murraine. "The grand total of connections comes to 12, including Quest, Mae-East, Global, AT&T, UUnet, Digex, Time Warner Telecom, Sprint, and Level3."
Ensuring that clients have access to the services they need, Wild Cherry has the equipment to handle things like real audio/video, streaming, and Web cams. "Our support policy is pretty simple," says Morraine, "Our job is to provide the hardware and server support you need to be profitable. If we don’t have it, call or write us."
Fast servers and up-time guarantees are certainly not uncommon in the hosting market. But Wild Cherry continues to deliver knowledge of the ever-changing industry, providing assurance that it will continue to adapt and thrive.
“We believe that the industry must become more self-regulatory, or expect governments worldwide to step in and do it for us. ‘Safe-guarding the public’ on hot issues such as SPAM and child porn need to become a bigger priority among not only hosts, but also every company doing business within the adult industry. The more of an interest we in the industry take, the better off we will be in the future."
