Wouldn't that be a dream world for Cloudflare? "We protect spammers and if you wanna be as well protected against said spammers, sign up for our firewall"
And not even then. Most VPN providers in the top 10 are actually very shady and their organizational structure is quite opaque.. to say the least. I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of the top providers are actually FBI fronts, like the ANOM chat app.
The insane thing is that, because the VPN has a 1GB/month traffic limit, there is no way to enforce it unless they associate all traffic with a Microsoft controlled user identity. Cloudflare literally has to keep track of any sites you visit and associate them to your ID to make it work.
Though, I do believe that for connections from public WiFi it's somewhat of an improvement. It establishes a minimal security baseline of: "ok, we'll sell your data and let FBI snoop on you, but we won't inject trojans in your downloads and then hijack your webcam to create ransom-porn (though the FBI/??? might)".
Note that the original post is from a purveyor of commercial email, he probably feels the heat from those artisanal servers.
You can run your own email servers(s) as long as you know what you are doing. Setting up your own is not for the faint of heart. However, cPanel will do the initial setup work. CSF will see to it that your mail server is moderately secure, and that the bots trying to kick down its doors are get banned. Setup of DMARC, SPF, etc increasingly gets automated. Mxtoolbox makes sure that all aspects of DNS and mailservers are correct. Finally, you can send mail to something like analyze.email, and they will score your server. If you score an 8 or better, your email will definitely go through (analyze.email will hand out demerits for NOT having a link in your email, for from and reply being the same, or for a lack of a list-unsubscribe.)
If you run your own business, an own website and email address is important for branding. Gmail sent “on behalf of” does not install a lot of trust.
Here are the downsides to outsourcing your email:
- Who will read your mail sitting on their server?
- Who will give your mail sitting on their server to anyone waving some legal papers?
- Who can kick you off their server without recourse, killing many years of investment into your email identity?
Here are the downsides to rolling your own email server:
- If an evil hacker invades your badly protected server, and uses it for gadzillions of spam, a nicer provider will turn off your outgoing email, a nastier one will null-route you no questions asked. That’s why you should start your career as an artisanal mailhoster on a VPS -- you can always rent another one. It gets nastier when a homelabber decides to do it from home. Hacker invades, Internet provider cancels your account for violation of TOS. You usually don’t have much choice when it comes to a new hardline provider, and it will take a while.
- A big danger are the countless blacklists. It is very hard not to be on any. Some will blacklist whole net blocks if one IP in the block misbehaves. Some are plainly extortionist; they want money for removal. Frankly, they should be taken to court.
The business is going to a subscription model, because blogging for ads simply doesn't pay enough anymore, it has long stopped doing so.
All the big newspapers, Bloomberg, now even Reuters go subscription, because ads simply doesn't pay enough anymore.
And we dream about big advertising money for our fledgling blog?
Forget it.
If you want to make money, sell your body, not your brain, go Onlyfans.
I have nothing to say about Medium, but if someone indeed can make $1K with a couple of articles about an arcane subject, then by all means do it.
You will not make the money it costs to run the web server of your own blog by writing a couple of posts a month.
To make some money, you will need several posts per day, on a hot subject, and you will have to promote it all day long.
I was editor-in-chief of a large, well-known website for many years, and I know what I am talking about.
We paid our contributors $25 a piece, that's how much it was worth. Later on, we could get away with paying nothing.
I know people with well-read and well-maintained websites who received $20 a month from Google Ads.
For a website to receive some traction, you must be at it for years, and after a few years, pay per clicks will be lower.
Websites grow with abandon, but advertising budgets don't. So the advertising dollars are split into smaller, and smaller pieces.
Serious advertising money goes into microtargeting, no more target groups, but target persons. For that, you must be a Facebook et al.
Basically, the times of making serious money with writing are over. I have many well-known journalist friends, and they hurt. Their numbers dwindle.
I was lucky, I made serious money decades ago by writing – as a copywriter for ad agencies. Even that doesn’t pay as royally as it used to. But to make a living with writing, you need to "go to the dark side," into advertising, PR, best to the PR department of a large company with long-term job security and health insurance.
Forget the easy money with your own website. Use it to build your brand, to advertise yourself, to put together a portfolio of your work, an interactive business card.
