A couple of you guys are assuming that $130 (£100) a month is cheap. You still got to make £100 each month in AdSense to cover your running costs without even starting to make a profit. Maybe you are making five figures each month, but I bet you're in the minority. If it was easy to create a website with the perfect niche that earns you loads of money without having to have millions of hits then everybody would be doing it.

@Netmeg you say you're paying $300 a year to host all those sites that generate that much traffic? However, you did say you got cloud flare which I'm assuming is going to be costing you $100 + each month as well. I doubt very much whether shared hosting alone would be able to handle that much traffic.

@ Ironside

I get 5,00,000 pageviews each month and costing 10$ with digitalocean. I had another site done by someone else which even on 20$ server would die with 20 visitors at a time.

Now with 10$ I manage to handle 500 visitors at a time.
It all depends on server configuration, Site design main thing with DB design.
I am a newbie in this field, in fact not from tech background. Learned coding recently.

I doubt it's possible with Indian traffic.

As an example my Indian traffic EPC for July was 15.9% of USA, 15.2% for 2017 so far, and has been at this kind of level for years so, basically, you need 6-7 times the traffic for US type of earnings and that's assuming your CTR stays the same, unlikely!

@Ironside well, $130 is a cheap hosting if you are making more than four figures. If not, you don't need this type of hosting. If you make £100, you can use any shared hosting for 10$ a year, and there is no reason to use $130 a month hosting.

And also, I never said it's easy to make five figures website. I am just saying that I would not waste my time on niche that is not profitable enough.

In past I also used shared hostings that was able to handle 100K / month traffic.

I use same hosting as neurropatic mentions above, never have any problems and it easily copes with quite high traffic levels while costing less than 1% of overall site revenues. The same company have much cheaper options if you have less visitors/earnings.

The only 'challenge' is that the pages load very fast, adsense not so much...

Generally hosting gets cheaper or stays the same as a % of earnings as these increase (that is, if visitors and earnings doubled you would not expect hosting to more than double in cost) so is not an obstacle to increasing earnings.

In past I also used shared hostings that was able to handle 100K / month traffic.

A good shared-hosting service can handle a lot more traffic than that (whether you're talking about users, sessions, or page views).

Add in a CDN (content delivery network) such as CloudFlare, which caches assets on remote servers around the world, and there's even less reason for many of us to worry about stress on the originating server.

When anyone first starts a $5 / month hosting is sufficient, or even "free" hosting on platforms like blogspot or wordpress. I started my business "free" for the first year or so at $0 / month hosting I think until around 5k~10k pv a day. Then I wanted to take it more serious from there, it was after an year of hobby site that I actually started using shared hosting...Then I grew from there. As knowledge and traffic increases, hosting costs starts to increase.

I overpay my hosting so I have more play room, that servers don't instantly crash if I mess things up. So far I think it's a sound business decision. For sure there's overhead, but it's worthwhile overhead IMO.

I see only junk ads this month, more than ever.
The medium CPC is lower each day.

However, you did say you got cloud flare which I'm assuming is going to be costing you $100 + each month as well. I doubt very much whether shared hosting alone would be able to handle that much traffic.

bzzzzt thanks for playing! Shared hosting can definitely handle that much traffic (it always has), and for CloudFlare, I'm on the free plan - I just pay the extra for the "Argo" service that speeds things up. That's only $5 per site per month except in months where the traffic is very heavy (as my sites are seasonal, that's not every month) so I only pay extra during heavy traffic months, and it was maybe $216 total for all the sites in June. Haven't gotten the July bill yet.

I think it's the forum on my website that requires the extra hosting. Without the forum, I don't think I would be creating anywhere near the amount of bandwidth that I do at the moment. We talk about how much traffic and hits a website host can handle each month. Some of them offer unlimited bandwidth, even on the shared hosting. But that's an absolute load of rubbish. Those no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. When you use a shared server you are sharing it with other users. As soon as you start affecting the server's performance your website goes down.

I'm quite sure that if your website is only using HTML and CSS then it's not taking up as much bandwidth on the server and can handle that extra traffic.

Had a very good Friday and I'm wondering how. It was awful till yesterday's morning then suddenly increased.

I want these AdSense ads to load faster! The earnings and views will go up if AdSense improves its rendering speed. Most of the time, the reader would scroll down while above fold ad unit will be loading. Even, the Google's page insight has pointed out Adsense ads in leverage, redirects etc. They really need to improve it.

I am starting to see back to school campaigns sprinkling up from major retailers. The RPM appears to be rising over time slowly, and it's much higher than that of last month.

Anyone else's Google Analytics on the fritz today? The live function seems to be busted.

@KayesM yup, I was just wondering if my host was down, but seems not. But it's already working again.

I am starting to see back to school campaigns sprinkling up from major retailers.

Yep, here, too. Then once Christmas ads start to show up after school starts, RPM will increase even more. I don't sell anything on my sites but still benefit from the auction pressure that comes with holiday advertising.

$4 up from last Saturday. August is indeed better but still not as good as June.

Sometimes I believe Google employees are backing Google here. The clawback is in my opinion taking money from publishers. I use both Adsense and Adwords. Clawed back around 50 euros a month but as advertiser never got some money back. Bad luck, coincidence?

By the way, the clawback is mostly during the days. Reducing several euros each day and at the end of the month another clawback. Nobody can check it's right (or legal) but never get any refunding as an advertiser is suspicious.

Nobody can check it's right (or legal) but never get any refunding as an advertiser is suspicious.

Other AdSense publishers who are also advertisers have reported getting refunds (yes, right here in this forum).

Looks like today is the lowest CPM over past few months

Glad I'm not the only one seeing extremely poor numbers today. Still got plenty of time to catch up.

Yes, today is really off the mark. I'm hoping it is just a delay in reporting.

I wonder how some of the well-known dating websites do nowadays with AdSense? There's one in particular that springs to mind that reportedly made several hundred thousand pounds every month. However, I would imagine that the majority of people who use dating websites do so from a mobile nowadays.

Insofar as I am concerned ... it's August, it's crap, much of my industry globally is on holiday ... EPC so far this month is 50% of average ... after 49 years of widget work I still can't wrap my head around all this vacation garbage all at the same time!

Very weird numbers today, Sunday Aug 6.... a lot worse than yesterday Saturday, which nearly never happens.

Is this a data issue, or did something happen overnight?

Yea I am also experiencing numbers WAY lower then every other day this month and the past few months by far, almost 40% lower then average. Hoping it is some kind of issue / reporting delay

I'm gonna have to start using Redbar's words. This sunday is diabolical.

The problem seems to be that all of my regular advertisers have disappeared across all of my sites. So they either all got together and decided to avoid my sites or this is a glitch in the targeting algorithm. If this is the new normal, then time to move on to other things. Time will tell.

Well, day is almost over and I am 50% lower than average with same number impressions. I have no idea what happens but i think if it would be a glitch then we already suppose to catch up and this did not happen.

Very good Sunday. Unbelievable numbers. In the first 15 hours earning was so bad that I didn't check AdSense entire day but when I checked at 1AM (8th August), the numbers were way too good! While on other hand, it was pathetic on my 2nd site.

Today (8th August) looks good so far.