EDIT: finally, Google won’t change it’s policy.. yet ? I know all too well that when Google decides something, they’ll implement it in a way or the other, acting sly and shutting down randomly without appeal. So if you start a Blogger or keep yours, remind yourself that Google doesn’t want you. You still should find a more welcoming place for your blog 🙂

Context

Hosting companies love bloggers. Bloggers spend time creating content, and the hosting companies just have to monetize with banners or keywords. Win-win ! But some contents are easier to monetize than others. Some content is illegal in some places in the world. And some content may shock children and/or their parents. Hosting companies providing “free” blogs usually want to stay out of trouble, so they often downright forbid “adult” content (“shocking, disturbing, or obscene material”), and often don’t think twice before removing an entire blog upon a single DMCA takedown notice. The legal costs to fight a class-action of angry church people or mad copyright industries are too high compared to a single blogger’s freedom of speech, ya know. Tumblr (owned by Yahoo) is well known to pull the plug when it receives too much DMCA complaints. WordPress.com (owned by Automattic) has quite strict rules about adult stuff (basically, you should not make money with it).

Blogger™ is one of the world’s biggest blogging platforms and is owned by Google, a private for-profit company. And yesterday, Blogger™ updated their policy regarding “adult” content: in one month, all sexually-explicit pictures and videos and [unnecessary] nudity will be forbidden and blogs containing those will be turned “private” (effectively shutting them down from the web). And you should feel yourself lucky if Google doesn’t downright remove your entire blog from it’s servers, making you unable to retrieve and backup your content.

The need for sex bloggers

It doesn’t matter if you write about your sexual experiences, write about general sexuality, review sextoys, publish sexy pictures and videos of yourself or publish your own real/3D porn movies: it all has the greater purpose of informing the public, comforting people with their bodies and/or sexuality, and tend towards safer and funnier sex. Intimate doesn’t mean secret. For too long sex and masturbation has been frown upon, shamed and censored. I think it has caused immense harm to society and the people who were “outside the norm” at a given time. 40 years ago freedoms were a bit unleashed, but things return sour pretty fast, like the “UK porn ban” shows, or Facebook and Apple’s battle to hide and remove every boob and nipple on their networks, may it be the view of a mother breastfeeding a baby. I felt all that pressure, all that secret, at the awkward silence of my father and the mocking giggles of my mother when something marginally lewd came up on TV, or my father’s mocking use of phrases like “dressing up like a fag”, I know they’re not mean, I know they would understand and accept me as onahole fucker+blogger. Many of us have no problem living our sexuality how the fuck we want. But there are families where taboos exist. There are families where even the hint of a masturbatory practice means being kicked out.

Sex blogs are important because, aside the optional arousal of the visitors, they offer different points of view, interesting facts, useful sex advice, etc. And sex bloggers gain of it too: I learned many things about myself and met lots of awesome people. That’s why I strongly approve any one who thinks about starting a sex blog.

The blog: what, where, how ?

With Blogger being ruled out as hosting option, there are not many big platforms you can turn to for your blog. One option comes to my mind though:

• WordPress.com

I really recommend new bloggers to start with a blog on the WordPress.com platform. This platform is operated by for-profit company Automattic, so expect keyword-ads. Sexual content is allowed on the platform under some conditions: it must respect US laws, and in your dashboard you must report your blog as being for mature audience according to their rules:

It does simply indicate that your blog shouldn’t be included in the WordPress.com directory or see itself promoted on the front page of the platform. Your blog stays online and can be found through search engines.

Creating a WordPress.com blog is fairly easy and provides lots of themes and widgets to customize your blog and make it your very own. You can export your content with a simple click, and all the acquired habits with that tool will prove useful if/when you get more in control of your blog.

Self-managing your blog: shared web hosting

Should you choose to transfer your existing blog or create a new on a shared web hosting, you’re “in-between”: you surely don’t have to maintain clusters of filers and database servers over virtualized cloud services in datacenters across the world, BUT you still need some technical knowledge, and some money. I can’t provide you either of those, just some advice:

• be ready to pay up to ~10 $ per month for the hosting service
• play around with the FTP (using a client like FileZilla), have a look inside the MySQL database (using PhpMyAdmin access provided by the host) — you don’t need those on a daily basis, it’s just in case of emergency or backup
• pick a web hosting service that provides “one-click installation” of WordPress
• choose a good domain name and remember that it can be transferred to another web hosting service if you want (domain name: for Onahole Review, it’s “onahole.eu”)

Shared web hosting services are many on the internet. Each provide different features at competitive prices. Sorry, but it’s pretty “hit and miss” even for a pro web admin like me. A few ideas I know:

• HostGator: US company, unlimited diskspace and bandwidth, control panel, one-click install (Infernal Monkey and Hey Epiphora use their service, they seem satisfied with them)
• OVH: French company, unlimited bandwidth, plenty diskspace for the price, manager, one-click install (n°1 in Europe, fairly good, sadly I was missing some features)
• (I used GoDaddy years ago but was fairly angry at their deceptive selling practices.. and since they supported SOPA, fuck them)
• (if you wanna know: as of today Onahole Review runs on shared hosting provided by a nonprofit)

Since they provide the useful cPanel management system, I think you should feel at ease with HostGator 🙂

Shared web hosting services are usually better at handling complaints: since you pay for the service, they can’t simply pull the plug on your hosting (even if their terms of usage legally makes them able to). But you shouldn’t place too much trust in the companies: keep making regular backups of your data. Also: HostGator states it’s not responsible for downtime or delays by Force Majeure including “acts of God”, which is a really weird and blurry event in the middle of a legally binding document 😀

About the blogging tool to use, I recommend WordPress. Yes, that’s the tool the WordPress.com platform is using. It’s free software edited by Automattic, that you can install on almost all web hosting. If the web hosting service provides one-click install of WordPress, then it’s even easier (no need to download, decompress, send over FTP, setup database, configure). In fact, only few bloggers aren’t using WordPress.. just to give you a hint on how customizable that tool is 🙂

Co-authored blogging

Another solution if you don’t wanna care about the underlying blog management: find another blogger and become author. One blog, multiple bloggers. That’s what Onahole Review does, and WordPress has great user system. While it’s not your own blog in this case, it still can help you learning to use WordPress and prepare to create your own blog later on.

Find your way and join the sex blogger’s community !