Don't Host on Namecheap for Monetization (Ezoic)

[Prose]

Namecheap is an amazing company. They have superb customer service that's online 24/7 to help noobs like me with our questions. They are known for being perhaps one of the most affordable domain name registrars. And they don't operate like the noob traps that offer domain names for free or very low prices with the plans to extortionate the customers later.

But where Namecheap falls short is integration with Ezoic. Here's a quote from Ezoic:

NOTE/Warning:

Namecheap currently processes Ezoic IP addresses incorrectly, producing origin errors unless you are on a VPS (dedicated server) hosting plan. They have not been able to whitelist Ezoic IPs for customers without upgrading their plan. We currently recommend that sites transition from Namecheap to another host (or free Ezioic hosting), unless they intend to upgrade their plan at Namecheap.

Here's how much Namecheap charges for dedicated servers:

This price doesn't include services such as cPanel, which would cost an additional 15 dollars per month at minimum.

I would have to pay nearly 64 dollars for the hosting, and an additional 15 dollars per month if I wanted to keep using cPanel. That's a whopping 89 dollars per month to have a website that could be monetized with Ezoic.

My intention is not to shit on Namecheap. They are a good host in my honest opinion. Yes, the servers do go down once in a while, and they can be slow at times. But overall, I can't say that I've had too many issues with them prior to my attempts to monetize my website hosted by them. And it's not like I have a massive website that absolutely has to be available 24/7 throughout the year.

But for us who want to try monetization with Ezoic – no, don't host on Namecheap. Even though they have affordable prices, good customer service, etc.

 

[Kingkong]

Oh, this is quite helpful. I have two of my sites hosted on Namecheap and I agree they aren't the very best web host around but they are cheap.

Once I start getting a lot of traffic on my sites, I will move to a better hosting company like Siteground or Bluehost.

 

[Prose]

Oh, this is quite helpful. I have two of my sites hosted on Namecheap and I agree they aren't the very best web host around but they are cheap.

Once I start getting a lot of traffic on my sites, I will move to a better hosting company like Siteground or Bluehost.

I don't know if Bluehost is it either, mate. I have never been their customer and I've heard lots of bad things about them. Maybe it's hearsay, but whatever, I'm not taking the risk. I'm careful when I see many social media influencers advertising one brand.

I no longer host my sites without a dedicated IP address. I don't want to share IP addresses with websites that are engaged in illegal activities, because many Internet Service Providers will block the IP addresses they use without a notice. This makes my websites vulnerable and potentially inaccessible to many people – and the worst thing is that I might not even know your website is affected. This is horrible for my website.

I believe that Namecheap is okay, but they have many issues. Namecheap's customer service could be improved. They are good at helping with basic problems and questions, but they seem quite helpless whenever there's a more challenging issue that should be fixed asap – such as my website becoming inaccessible.

They didn't even try to sell me a dedicated IP address to avoid being blocked by various Internet Service Providers. I had to ask for it myself. I'm pretty sure that many of their customers don't know they could buy a dedicated IP address and reduce the risk of being blocked by Internet Service Providers because of sharing the same IP address with some stupid scam sites.

 

[NoSandbox]

Just use Cloudways with Linode or Digital Ocean! Cheaper, easier, better. We're getting 95-100 Core Web Vitals on mobile.

 

[Kingkong]

How about Rocket.net or WPX? I've heard a lot of nice things about them.

 

[secretagentdad]

I have been extremely happy with tier.net

They're not very noob friendly but have great rates.
Like the best rates. With out them backlink shitter would not exist.

 

[Siberian]

How about Rocket.net or WPX? I've heard a lot of nice things about them.

I host three sites on wpx.net. One uses ezoic, the others are on Adsense. All three have the same theme, roughly the same plugins. Ezoic works fine on my wpx site, although it’s still slower than the other two.

Moving my sites across to wpx.net (edit: from namecheap) was pretty straightforward, and I didn’t experience any Ezoic problems as I transferred. I use their plugin, though, rather than nameserver integration, which might make things simpler.

 

[axibert]

I am not sure why you would want to use Ezoic in the first place. Sure they promise you higher earnings than adsense and in the beginning this will be true. But the whole system destroys your page speed. They even sell a "Page Speed" plugin made by themselves to help you tackle their OWN page speed issues. And they charge a lot for it.

They will try to take control of your whole site, placing ads wherever their system thinks will fit. This will cause issues with the user experience and will slowly lead to the destruction of your site.
Maybe other people have had better experience but for me, I will never ever do anything with ezoic again.

 

[thisishatred]

I am not sure why you would want to use Ezoic in the first place. Sure they promise you higher earnings than adsense and in the beginning this will be true. But the whole system destroys your page speed. They even sell a "Page Speed" plugin made by themselves to help you tackle their OWN page speed issues. And they charge a lot for it.

They will try to take control of your whole site, placing ads wherever their system thinks will fit. This will cause issues with the user experience and will slowly lead to the destruction of your site.
Maybe other people have had better experience but for me, I will never ever do anything with ezoic again.

To comment on the former:

What were your page speeds like before the addition of Ezoic ads?

No offense but if you're already performing poorly, the addition of whatever Ad provider, whether it's Adsense, Ezoic, or Mediavine, you're going to have issues regardless. I mean Christ, even the Folks at Mediavine developed a theme for their users because most people have bloated themes - mediavine.com/products/trellis/

I'm not sure where people get this notion that it "destroys" page speed. I mean I even just checked one of my sites that's built with Oxygen Builder and runs Ezoic ads.

Mobile: 83
Desktop: 99
Does it fail? Yes.
My organic position for the term: 1st

We can even look at top tier media agencies who have borderline abysmal page-speed scores and rank just fine.

We can also look at the folks from Income School (this site is public and in their videos)
https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?ur...m/equipment-needed-to-cater-your-own-wedding/

They seem to be ranking fine now that they've sussed out their indexing issues.
Their scores are even lower than mine.


To comment on the latter:

"They will try to take control of your whole site, placing ads wherever their system thinks will fit."

So, you do know that you have complete control over how the ads are placed on YOUR site right? Meaning if you don't want to absolutely skull-fuck your readers with ads, you don't have to. I mean on the site above, my content is full width and I don't even have a side-bar; I don't even use their placeholders and place the ads how I want.

Ezoic has never once emailed me or told me they want to "control" the ads on my site.

In my opinion, Ezoic pays more than the peanuts you get with Adsense and actually deploys the ads in a more optimized manner than something like Newor Media.

 

[axibert]

To comment on the former:

What were your page speeds like before the addition of Ezoic ads?

No offense but if you're already performing poorly, the addition of whatever Ad provider, whether it's Adsense, Ezoic, or Mediavine, you're going to have issues regardless. I mean Christ, even the Folks at Mediavine developed a theme for their users because most people have bloated themes - mediavine.com/products/trellis/

I'm not sure where people get this notion that it "destroys" page speed. I mean I even just checked one of my sites that's built with Oxygen Builder and runs Ezoic ads.

Mobile: 83
Desktop: 99
Does it fail? Yes.
My organic position for the term: 1st

We can even look at top tier media agencies who have borderline abysmal page-speed scores and rank just fine.

We can also look at the folks from Income School (this site is public and in their videos)
https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https://cookforfolks.com/equipment-needed-to-cater-your-own-wedding/

They seem to be ranking fine now that they've sussed out their indexing issues.
Their scores are even lower than mine.


To comment on the latter:

"They will try to take control of your whole site, placing ads wherever their system thinks will fit."

So, you do know that you have complete control over how the ads are placed on YOUR site right? Meaning if you don't want to absolutely skull-fuck your readers with ads, you don't have to. I mean on the site above, my content is full width and I don't even have a side-bar; I don't even use their placeholders and place the ads how I want.

Ezoic has never once emailed me or told me they want to "control" the ads on my site.

In my opinion, Ezoic pays more than the peanuts you get with Adsense and actually deploys the ads in a more optimized manner than something like Newor Media.

I see, your page speed is fine. Have you bought the plugin they offer?

And you are right, they do pay more, but in my case that was due to the obstrusive ads that the system automatically placed. I might have missed finetuning the ad positioning to the point where it would have been acceptable. The way it was set up in my case was the recommended way by my Ezoic manager to let the system run and adjust itself over time. Maybe this was my mistake, but to me at that time it had the impression to be trapped in this system. So after a few month with declining performance of my site I dropped it.

At the time when I tried them out (around 2018) I had already been split testing my adsense with ampedsense and had increased the regular earnings quite a bit this way already. So I could not see the benefits back then.

I am not trying to bash Ezoic, this was just my personal experience. I find it interesting that some of the users here are using it and might need to reconsider it.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I am not trying to bash Ezoic, this was just my personal experience. I find it interesting that some of the users here are using it and might need to reconsider it.

In my opinion, Ezoic is and should be nothing more than a stepping stone for most sites. On my newest project, I flat out skipped them and just gave up any revenue I could have got from them. I went from Adsense to Mediavine with no middle steps.

To be fair, this was when, if you already had a contract with Mediavine you could get more sites in at 10k sessions instead of 30k sessions. And soon after I got in at 10k sessions per month they killed that and said every site had to hit 50k sessions. Big leap

But my point is, that's how much I despised the idea of putting Ezoic on my site. And I have to thank Adsense's Auto Ads for that. They were such a catastrophe that it woke me up to how bad Ezoic would be. I stuck with manual placements and Adsense.

 

[thisishatred]

I see, your page speed is fine. Have you bought the plugin they offer?

And you are right, they do pay more, but in my case that was due to the obstrusive ads that the system automatically placed. I might have missed finetuning the ad positioning to the point where it would have been acceptable. The way it was set up in my case was the recommended way by my Ezoic manager to let the system run and adjust itself over time. Maybe this was my mistake, but to me at that time it had the impression to be trapped in this system. So after a few month with declining performance of my site I dropped it.

At the time when I tried them out (around 2018) I had already been split testing my adsense with ampedsense and had increased the regular earnings quite a bit this way already. So I could not see the benefits back then.

I am not trying to bash Ezoic, this was just my personal experience. I find it interesting that some of the users here are using it and might need to reconsider it.

I mean you have a bad taste in your mouth from an experience 4 years ago - I feel the same way with AdSense.

This site is a one-off project and no I don't own the paid plugin to optimize my speed - The site is built with Oxygen Builder and the only other "optimization" plugins I use are FlyingPress and Asset CleanUp: Page Speed Booster (to disable random CSS that's generated site-wide from my contact form plugin).

And soon after I got in at 10k sessions per month they killed that and said every site had to hit 50k sessions. Big leap"

From a recent email I saw from a business associate, they said "...we can take a look starting at the 25-30k range since we like to give our existing publishers a bit more wiggle room with session requirements."
That was Feb. 7th 2022.

They were such a catastrophe that it woke me up to how bad Ezoic would be. I stuck with manual placements and Adsense.

Again though, you can manually setups Ads on a per-post basis with Ezoic? The site above I'm literally doing that across 50 posts - 4-8 ads per page (based on content length), manually setup, no placeholders.

If there is a certain page - like your homepage for instance - that you don't want ads, they won't exist because you have no placeholders.


What @Ryuzaki said is true though - It's a stepping stone regardless.

----------------

This is gonna be a double post but I had to backtrack emails from like a year ago or more.

Here's a quick example of me being a dick-head to an Ezoic staff member messaging one of my sites and them responding to my comments. You might notice a number of these things are actually being brought up here - like the paid plugin.

There are previous emails/question/answer type things before this but I'm not too keen on revealing my information.

Ezoic: I hear what you're saying. I've worked with hundreds of publishers like yourself over 3 years here at Ezoic. Many of them had similar hesitations going in, thinking that we would negatively impact user experience on their websites, have lower earnings than Mediavine or that we'd slow down their site/make them pay to speed it back up. But the clients I work with who end up moving forward with a test find their experiences to be quite the opposite.

Me being a dick-head: Nothing quite like a full footer ad, in content ads, and side-bar ads to really make you hate browsing a website. Do I think you guys can get me 60% more income? Sure. At what cost though?

Ezoic: We have never required any publisher to test specific types of ads on their website. Don't like the footer ad? You can turn it off and it will never show to your site visitors. No in-content/sidebar ads? You can add, delete and fully customize every single ad location. We assist in setting up the ad testing but you can customize it based on your preferences. Other options we offer are setting a hard limit on maximum ads per page, blocking of certain ad categories, and user-experience focused ad optimization.

Me being a dick-head: I can hear the arguments right now in regards to it not affecting UX but then again, I could simply just apply to Mediavine and make more?

Ezoic: There is this false belief that publishers make more money with Mediavine than they would with Ezoic. If that's really the case, why does Mediavine work so hard to make sure that their publishers use their platform exclusively, including requiring them to lock into a contract and making them pay if they want to cancel?

You'd never have to sign a contract with Ezoic or pay for wanting to leave. We even allow every publisher the ability to "split test" with other partners. For example, you can see how well Ezoic performs on 50% of traffic while comparing it to performance from another partner on the other 50%, side-by-side. Last I checked, Mediavine threatens their customers if they try to do this. The split is also up to you, no limits on which partner you want to test or how much traffic you want to test us on. I have had many cases where publishers started with Ezoic on just 5% of traffic, saw they were earning more on a per-session basis with us, then fully switched over based on that testing data.
Even the reasons they give for why they require a contract don't make sense. On their website they claim that they can only set bid floors if they have all of your ad inventory. We literally do this regardless of how much of your ad inventory you give us in a split test...so why can't they?

Me being a dick-head: Don't users have to pay or install additional plugins to speed up your ad performance? Last I heard that was the case. Why isn't that simply intrinsic to your ad platform in general?

Ezoic: We do not require users to pay or install additional plugins to speed up ad performance. We help improve site speed and core web vitals for free, so it's intrinsic to the platform. And it's not a separate plugin, it's acquired when you connect to Ezoic's servers.

We used to have a paid site speed product, but we have completely done away with that. We even offer it for free to sites that aren't using our ad platform (up to 500,000 page views/monthly).

It sounds like you've already made up your mind. But if you have a few minutes, please read over my responses to the points you've made. I'm certain this is worth your time to explore.

---------

This site didn't end up with Ezoic but it convinced me to try them out on lower-tier shit, like the site above. Everything he said to me in regards to manually setting up ads, not having to pay for a plugin, etc. were true.
Edit: Apart from the earnings bit, I can't vouch for that.

Food for thought folks.

 

[Prose]

Update: Namecheap have fixed their shit and Ezoic is OK now.

 

[Zyzz]

Update: Namecheap have fixed their shit and Ezoic is OK now.

What hosting plan are you on?

 

[Prose]

What hosting plan are you on?

Stellar plus (shared hosting). I do have a dedicated IP which costs 20 dollars extra per year.

 

[SmokeTree]

Shared hosting is pure shit and always has been. It's the low budget apartment complexes, you don't even want pumper sites there anymore. Want to take a chance of being on the same IP as a pedophile site? Shared hosting all the way baby... Just get a VPS, maybe find a 1 click OpenLightspeed installer and just spend a few days learning the MAYBE 10 commands to spin up new sites. The ROI is realized with the first 2-3 sites. It just never fails to perplex me why people will practically go to the ends of the earth just so they can cling to a cpanel that is slow, bulky and has a plethora of unnecessary options. It smacks of "Enterprise" and still looks like it came from 2006. This is not how to evolve.