Vicetemple.com review

First Impressions

Vicetemple isn’t your average hosting provider, but rather a one-stop shop specifically built for the adult entertainment industry, offering a safe haven for creators and businesses who often find themselves restricted by the more well-known providers. They first opened their doors in 2016 and are based out of the Netherlands, famous for its strong stance on freedom of expression. The services they offer go far beyond simple web hosting as they provide a full ecosystem including adult-friendly shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated server plans, domain registration, specialized WordPress themes for adult content, turnkey clone scripts for launching tube sites or webcam platforms, and even custom web development and SEO consulting services. They currently have over 1700 customers which they serve out of their ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified data centers in Amsterdam.

Trial Period

Unfortunately, this provider doesn’t offer any free trials for you to test them out before signing up, but they do offer the next best thing, and that is a 30-day money back guarantee. If within this period you feel that they don’t live up to your expectations, simply cancel your plan with them for a full refund – no questions asked.

Billing Cycle

Their shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated server plans offer users the choice to either monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual, biennially, or even triennially, and they currently accept payments via bank transfers, all major credit cards, Bitcoin, as well as Altcoins.

Control Panel

When it comes to control panels, Vicetemple keeps things straightforward. On their shared hosting they include the hugely popular cPanel control panel free of charge. This panel is the industry favourite by far for those who don’t already know and comes with a user-friendly interface from where one can easily manage all aspects of your hosting account, such as emails, SSL certificates, DNS, and more, with little effort.

But the moment you step up to a VPS or a dedicated server, the training wheels come off and you actually get a choice. They let you pick between a couple of solid, free alternatives like Hestia or aaPanel if you're looking to keep costs down as these are free of charge, or you can go the premium route and add a cPanel/WHM license for an additional fee. It's a good and flexible setup as you're not locked into anything, and it really just depends on whether you want the industry-standard powerhouse that costs a bit more, or if you're comfortable with a free panel that will get the job done.

Limits

This hosting provider offers users 4 shared hosting plans to choose from. They range from 15GB lightning-fast SSD disk space and 20x MySQL databases on the “Play Bunny” plan, their entry-level shared hosting plan, up to 180GB fast SSD storage and unlimited MySQL databases on the “Reverent Saint” plan, their top-tier option. The plans are affordable, come with full data privacy, a free SSL certificate, and an uptime guarantee of 99.9%.

On the VPS side they give you a bit more options. All these plans run on Intel Xeon CPUs and you get to choose between Los Angeles, Miami, Amsterdam, or Toronto for your server location. As with their shared hosting, these plans are all budget friendly. Take for example their entry-level VPS plan, the “Mischievous Noble”, which comes with 2GB RAM, 1 Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 Processor, 100Mbps bandwidth, unlimited traffic, a free SSL certificate by Let’s Encrypt, 20GB blazing-fast SSD disk space with RAID 10, and 1 dedicated IP address for only $28 per month. Great bang for your buck!

Website Builder

Vicetemple doesn’t offer any proprietary drag-and-drop website builders as part of their plans, however, all their shared hosting plans come standard with Softaculous, which is that one-click installer you've probably seen before, and with this you can get the WordPress content management system installed in seconds. Once that is done you can install one of the many adult themed WordPress themes that you can edit to create your website.

If building a website isn’t up your alley, you can also get them to do the dirty work as they also offer full-on website design services where they'll build the whole thing for you. There are a couple of design plans one can buy and they are not cheap! These plans range from $1500 for a 5 page website on their “Basic” plan, up to the eye-watering $50000 “Advanced” plan, which includes a 25 page website that is fully optimized, with unlimited revisions, copywriting, and keyword research.

Security

When it comes to security, ViceTemple seems to take a basic approach across the board, no matter which plan you pick. All their plans include a free SSL certificate, automatic daily backups to keep your content safe, and DDoS attack protection to keep your site up during flooding attacks. As mentioned before in this review, there's also a strong emphasis on data privacy, with policies in place to protect your information and discreet billing, which is a huge plus in this industry. Besides these features they don’t disclose any other information regarding the security of their infrastructure or plans.

OS

All their shared hosting plans run on the CentOS operating system, a free and open-source operating system that is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and is known for being very stable and secure. Their VPS and dedicated server plans on the other hand offer users the choice between Ubuntu 22.04 / 22.04, Debian 11 / 12, CentOS 9.3, FreeBSD, or Alma Linux 9, and one can also request a Windows Server licence, but this will cost extra.

Support

If (and when, I should rather say) you run into problems, you can reach their support agents via live chat or by submitting a support ticket, which is their preferred method. In my experience, their agents usually respond within an hour on tickets, but live chat might leave you hanging as there doesn’t seem to be someone always available. Not the best support I have seen, but also not the worst either.

Conclusion

Is Vicetemple the right hosting provider for you? Well, that all depends on your specific needs. In my opinion, they are probably worth a look if you're in the adult industry, running a porn site, a webcam platform, or something along those lines. Their prices, besides of course their web development fees, are affordable and their plans are well structured and reliable. However, if your website has nothing to do with adult content, this is not the place for you, as they can come across as very offensive to some.