New server and hosting company

[jhnmdahl]

We transitioned from Bluehost to Knownhost on 2023-12-04, and were available but locked for new postings for a couple hours in the early afternoon. Our new server has allows us two processors and more memory, better support, and unlimited storage for attachments (we were starting to approach Bluehost's limits). It should be faster as well, but otherwise the same. Please let me know if you experience anything weird once you're logged back on,

John

[AsLan7]

We transitioned from Bluehost to Knownhost on 2023-12-04, and were available but locked for new postings for a couple hours in the early afternoon. Our new server has allows us two processors and more memory, better support, and unlimited storage for attachments (we were starting to approach Bluehost's limits). It should be faster as well, but otherwise the same. Please let me know if you experience anything weird once you're logged back on,

John

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Nice buddy. Working so far for me.

[jhnmdahl]

Thanks - seems to be a good move so far.

And I don't know a whole lot about Temu, but they seem to be winning ad bids on our site quite a bit and are in essence paying for a significant portion of our hosting. Feels a bit odd not to have boat insurance, boat supplies, and the like around quite as much anymore, but if Temu's paying more for the ad space I'll take the contribution

[kas232ca]

Sooo, I run an ad blocker. I also know hosting costs money. Do you have a donate link to help out?

[jhnmdahl]

KAS, no we don't, but we can cover costs now with the ad revenue we get. Some members shut their ad blockers off for Cobaltchat and ignore the ads (although it looks like some click on them occasionally as well, which pays a LOT better).

[jhnmdahl]

Just a quick note - Google decided to run an "optimization" that introduce a bunch more ads (mostly in between posts within a thread), which I stopped as soon as I became aware. So, if you saw a bunch of new ads in new places the first few days of March, that's what was going on.

[AsLan7]

Just a quick note - Google decided to run an "optimization" that introduce a bunch more ads (mostly in between posts within a thread), which I stopped as soon as I became aware. So, if you saw a bunch of new ads in new places the first few days of March, that's what was going on.

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I did notice this. Thanks for the update John.

[jhnmdahl]

Just a quick note - Google decided to run an "optimization" that introduce a bunch more ads (mostly in between posts within a thread), which I stopped as soon as I became aware. So, if you saw a bunch of new ads in new places the first few days of March, that's what was going on.

I did notice this. Thanks for the update John.

I think Google keeps wanting to show year-over-year increases in revenue, so keeps mucking with how ads are presented. Some of Google's changes are easy to limit and some are not. It used to be that they'd ask you to "run an experiment," but now they just do it on their own and then when it results in a bump in ad revenue automatically switch you over to the new ad scheme with no obvious way to switch back.

I wish there were more competition for Google ads - I' be happy to give Facebook ads or something a try. Fortunately the Google ads do make enough even for a small site like ours to pay the hundreds of dollars in hosting fees we need per year, and I am grateful for that.

John

[Krob1114]

John, I'm having trouble uploading pictures.
Got this error message:

ERROR
The image must be at least 0 pixels wide, 0 pixels high and at most 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels high. The submitted image is 1080 pixels wide and 1440 pixels high.


Picture I was trying to post was 816KB.

[jhnmdahl]

test cat original is 6720x4880 and 5MB - auto-scaled correctly down to 1000x666

I sent a PM - if you can send me the image, I can see if I can figure out why it isn't working.

Longtail.JPG