Every so often, someone asks me how we manage our blog. It’s tempting to want to express yourself on the Internet. Blogging is a fun way to do that. If you want to create a sexually oriented blog, there are some issues to consider. There are two major providers of free blogs: blogger.com and wordpress.com. Both offer free, easy-to-setup blogging websites. WordPress.com prohibits sexual material and is very efficient at shutting blogs off without warning. Blogger does allow most sexual content. However, you will get a warning page in front of your site. Google owns Blogger and has threatened to shut down sexual sites in the past. They changed their minds and decided to allow them.

Our site is set up on a private Internet service provider (ISP). We pay for a shared server in the cloud. We got the necessary base software installed as part of the server. We had to set up and add other software we might need. The way we did it requires some knowledge of Linux administration and other technical skills. Given the size of our site, it was the only affordable way to go. More on our techy stuff at the end of this post.

There are many independent pay-to-play ISPs out there. Their services range in price from about five bucks a month up to, well, a lot. I’ve worked with two. Both offer good service at fair prices. For the record, I don’t get any money from either for suggesting their offerings.

The simplest to use and one of the cheapest is EasyWP on https://www.namecheap.com. I’ve been working with this company for many years. They are one of the world’s largest domain registrars and offer some nice additional services. One is EasyWP. EasyWP Turbo is only $68 for the first year and less than $100/year after that. The price includes unlimited bandwidth, free software installation, and 24/7 customer support. They have a cheaper tier, but it requires you to buy an SSL certificate (needed to do the “https:” instead of “http:”). It’s robust enough to handle a pretty busy blog. We used this service for a while.

The other ISP I’ve used is Hostgator.com. They are one of the largest web-hosting ISPs in the world. Their starter WordPress package is $5.95/month for the first three years (paid in advance). It goes way up after that. I’ve used them for vanilla blogs. I have no idea about whether or not they care about your content. They also offer very good tech support.

There are hundreds of other ISPs. I have used a couple I didn’t like. If you build a WordPress blog, there are excellent migration plugins available. Moving from one ISP to another is fairly simple and painless. It’s easy to move when the sale price period is over. Also, register your domain name even if you use Blogger or the free WordPress service. If you don’t, someone else might.

How our site works

This site lives in the AWS cloud. We are on an EC2 WordPress instance. Unlike Hostgator and Namecheap, we have full control of our virtual server. Our instance is 2 CPUs with 4GB ram and 80 GB solid state disk. We have installed database caching software and plugin (Redis) to support our site. We also run Matomo web statistics.

Our site is served via the AWS Cloudfront CDN (Content Delivery Network). This consists of more than 70 servers around the world that deliver our content to visitors. That’s free. This setup requires lots of reading and tinkering. There is some command line work installing and maintaining the non-WordPress software. It’s more expensive than Namechap or HostGator but a lot more powerful.

I don’t spend a ton of time managing our system. It took a while to set up. I just finished migrating to a different technical architecture on AWS. It wasn’t terribly hard to do, just lots of reading and finicky steps. We will save a few bucks a month with the new arrangement. Performance seems a little better too.

I don’t want to appear rude, so I’ll say this publically, I almost never answer “Contact Us” messages that want advice of one sort or another.  Like many other bloggers, I receive a fair number of this sort of queries. I’m not sure why people believe that journalists (bloggers are journalists) should be expected to provide personalized service to individual readers.

It isn’t that I think I am too good to help out. It’s just that writing an almost-daily post takes a lot of time and effort. I don’t have the time or desire to reply individually to people I’ve never met. By the way, none of those people ever express any interest in us. They want advice on chastity and FLR. Most don’t even take the time to do a site search to see if their questions had already been answered in posts.

Occasionally, someone sends an interesting email that gets my attention. I do answer those. I understand how hard it is to find advice on these subjects. When we first got started, I sent a contact us email to a blogger. He never answered.

The online world is a strange place. Bloggers, like us, share intimate details of our lives. We aren’t compensated for our writing. We do it because we want to. Some of us actually pay for the facilities to publish what we write. Most blogs get very few readers. We are lucky. Quite a few people read what we write.

The people who send demanding emails wanting personal advice tend to come to us via Google or other search engines. Based on what they write, I don’t think they bothered to read a single line on our site. They just click the “Contact” button and expect free help. Our regular readers offer comments to our posts, and if they have questions, they ask them in that public forum. I love answering comments…well, most comments. Some comments are obvious attempts to solicit advice without reading our content.

Speaking of content, bloggers jealously guard their ownership of their audience. Most will never mention another blog, much less post a link to it. That’s dumb. All of us are connected by omnipresent search engines. Type a query about “male chastity,” and you will see pretty much everyone writing about it. The same is true about any subject. I don’t have time to read too many blogs like ours, but when I find one that has something to say that I want to share, I feel fine about publishing a link to it. They almost never return the favor.

Anyone who owns a website can get detailed statistical data about who is reading it. Google provides free, detailed information. Others do too. We have a dedicated server running analytical software that counts each visit and pageview. We don’t know who reads our blog. Our readers’ identity is safe. We do know how many people read each page and visit on any given day. We know what country they come from. We also know if they clicked a link on another site or search engine to find us.

This information is useful. It helps us understand what our audience wants to read. It lets us know how many people visit and how many pages they read on each visit. Right now, our average visitor reads between two and three pages. Almost half navigate directly to our site. They aren’t coming from search engines or other website links. I like that a lot. It means we are a destination. ChatGPT includes our site in its data model. Almost 40,000 references are in it.

All this is encouraging. It’s fun to be well-known. It doesn’t buy us anything. We have nothing to sell and we don’t solicit donations or subscriptions.  One day we may have to, but not now. You may wonder what we want in contacts. I would love to hear ideas about what might be interesting for us to write about. It’s great when we learn about something new. That’s always wonderful fun.

So far the cabergoline isn’t working. I’m still anorgasmic after more than eleven weeks. I increased the dose to .5 mg. That’s as high as I was told to go. It looks like prolactin isn’t my problem. Maybe it is psychological. I just don’t know. Perhaps the universe is telling me that it’s time to give up on sex. Mrs. Lion seems happy without it. It would be more than a little ironic that a male chastity blogger lost his ability to get off. He also lost the ability to get an erection without help. What does a sex blogger write about if he can’t have sex? What does he do with his need for it? When do I just give up?

We tried again on Saturday night. I gave myself a Trimix shot and was rewarded with a good erection. Mrs. Lion gave me oral sex. It felt great…and then it didn’t. Same problem as before. I had a feeling that if Mrs. Lion could go on long enough, the arousal would return. The problem was that it was already taking too long. I’m also pretty sure that I was fooling myself.

I don’t know if Mrs. Lion wants to keep trying. If she does, maybe we need to do more. I don’t know. Right now, I’m feeling sad and a little lost. I don’t see a path to success. I guess I’ll go watch a movie on TV.

It looks like the folks at WordPress.com have been attacking sexually-oriented blogs again. One blog, Denying Thumper has been around longer than us. Apparently, the folks at his hosting company (Automatic.com) suddenly decided his content is not suitable for them to carry. This is insane since his site is a well-respected male chastity blog with a long history of well-written posts. If you go to his URL (Link), you get a page from WordPress.com saying that the content was removed because it was unsuitable for their tender, right-wing minds.

Years ago, this blog was hosted by Automatic. I was threatened several times regarding our “adult” content. It cost us over $300 a year for their hosting services. I moved us to a less expensive and adult-friendly service provider. We moved again when the new provider got too expensive. We made another move for technical reasons. For the last couple of years, our blog lives in the cloud. It’s a bit more expensive, but then we’ve grown quite a bit. Most importantly, there aren’t any censors or technical limits.  I’m very happy with our hosting provider.

There are two big outfits that offer free hosting. Automatic (wordpress.com) is probably the largest. You can get a starter blog going for free. If you want any frills, expect to start paying. Blogger, a Google company, is the other main provider. A few years ago, Google decided to eliminate all adult blogs on its service. After a huge fuss by the online community, Google reversed itself and is happy to host adult content. Unlike wordpress.com, Google puts up an interstitial page with a warning in front of adult sites. I think that’s a fair way to do things. It’s possible to have an acceptable-if-basic blog for free on Blogger.

Of course, beggars can’t be choosers and there is very little selection when it comes to site design on the Google service. WordPress.com offers a lot more design flexibility. The tradeoff is that WordPress limits its free sites to very limited content and will start charging if too many people visit the sites. Blogger doesn’t do that.

Most hosting services censor their customers’ content. Sex-friendly hosting companies are rare. There are a few. One that I like is EasyWP, which is offered by Namecheap.com. Namecheap is one of the world’s largest domain name registrars. They are famous for their steadfast defense of their customer’s privacy. Other registrars like Godaddy have frequently caved to government pressure and revealed details about their customers. Anyway, Namecheap offers EasyWP which is an inexpensive, easy-to-use WordPress hosting service. We used it for a couple of years. We only left because they restricted the use of a plugin we like. It’s the one that shows links to the latest posts on blogs we follow.

Quite a few bloggers have no experience working with websites. There is a learning curve associated with starting any blog. Services like Blogger and WordPress.com make it a little easier. EasyWP is just as simple to use as WordPress.com. It’s too bad that WordPress.com is so anti-sex. I hope that Thumper decides to move his site to a friendlier host.