Tech Side of Running a Small Paysite

Are you covered? Here are some areas to consider.

Keep it simple, and stay with stuff that makes sense to YOU!!!

Basic technical knowledge.

• Do you enough to avoid screwing up stuff that's already working?
• Can you tell when tech support is "bullshitting" you?
• Do you know enough to at least ask the right questions, and understand the answers?
• If not, I hope you have a partner who does! (OT Scripts can also provide tech support at a standard hourly rate.)

Do scripts make you money?

• Automation won't necessarily make you money. Consider the value of time saved and money saved.
• What is your vendor's reputation? What tech support is available?

Hackers and Fraud

• Consider what is the mostly costly to you personally, and set your priorities accordingly. Is credit card fraud more costly, or a spike in bandwidth?
• Does a bandwidth spike cost you more, or general overage for the month. That is, will a site ripper cost you more, or general password trading activity?
• What security do you have, or not have? How quickly can you detect and respond to a serious problem?
• How security conscious are you? Do you know what hackers look for? Do you know what url spoofing is? How good a handle do you have on your password problems?

Specific vulnerabilities

• If your paysite is on a shared server, I have a bridge and some nice desert swampland to sell you. A virtual-hosted account means that any other user could open up a security hole, and down you go.
• Are you your own server admin? Unless you have some big-time expertise, you're kidding yourself.
• How security-conscious are the scripts you're installing on your server? Are there loopholes allowing someone to poke around on your server?

Disaster Recovery

• How quickly can you be back on the air?
• Can you deal with a trashed database?
• What if the server gets hacked?

The above is pretty much a checklist for covering your back side. On the air we can cover the positive things to do to make life a LOT easier; and please do check out the Paysite Content Manager from OT Scripts!

• OT Scripts Affiliate Program
• OT Scripts Home Page
• The Paysite Content Manager
• Server Secrets, tutorial on file permissions and things that will bite you
• Old Tom's tutorials at VNWR.com
• Hacked Password Monitor: Contact Us for details. We don't make hacking info publicly available, for obvious reasons!
• Do you need help with something that's beyond what your ISP will do for you? We have some extremely knowledgeable people at OT Scripts who can take a look.