Apparently making your AdSense earnings crater is as simple as changing your IP address for your site. Wheee!
For those interested, I used to have a shared VM and did some hosting for my sis in law’s WordPress instance. Which is fine, but in the last few days she was soliciting help from someone on Fiverr to add some things to her website, and they apparently tried to install a backdoor on her site – I believe unsuccessfully – but it was enough for me. That was all the incentive I needed to split the sites onto different VMs, and ensure nothing we did affected the other. But now my earnings are in the toity, since in doing this the IP of my website changed. Oh well, I don’t regret it, it was the right thing to do.
I was also looking into doing hosting with some alternative companies. OVHCloud has been completely rock solid for hosting my sites for more than a year now, and my Proxmox VMs have run flawlessly on their hardware as well. I mean, aside from when I accidentally mess them up myself. OVH’s support has also been fine, but of course I don’t often need help from them, if the IPMI is up and the network is up, in general I take care of everything myself.
But always looking to save a bit of money (and wanting to try out some new hosts which I genuinely think is fun to do) I started looking around for bare metal hosting providers. I saw several folks recommending netcup and thought ‘why not, let’s try and order a bare metal box’; boy was that a mistake. I’m not even going to give them a hyperlink after this escapade. Aside from the very invasive procedure they have to ‘verify’ your account, they seem completely unaware of how US citizens who run small businesses work. Since my ‘billing address’ (A UPS Store box in the same town I live in) was not what was not what was printed on my license, they decided to immediately terminate my order. Nevermind that I’d clearly proven I was indeed myself, as they required a selfie of me holding my ID. But because my business billing address is not my house, get lost Chris. Support has since been sweet as pie to me, but trust is not easily re-won.
But this is just demonstrates a very common problem of tech companies of all sizes – often you make one mistake in the sign up process (and often don’t know you did) and you will be put in the bit bucket with support (or the entire company), and can never get out of it. It’s a shame that this is how tech has come to work in the 2020’s, but here we are. I am really reconsidering doing business with any big tech companies that I don’t strictly need to, especially given how many of them hand out my personal data which then gets hacked by stupidly lazy security practices on these 3rd party data processors. If you live in the US and use any company with electronic records, I would all but guarantee at least one member of your family’s personal information has already been stolen, even if they haven’t bothered getting around to telling you yet.
Anyway, I will end this rant by saying we need to do better as companies, and as individuals. Trusting these tech companies continues to bite me in the butt, but at the moment it doesn’t feel like there are many alternatives.