This article especially emphasizes the title of my cozy blog “How to create an affiliate network and not go broke.” The situation that will be discussed today, its causes and consequences, is guaranteed to lead to the death of several networks at once. And the rest of the victims will be left afloat only due to the airbag or resourcefulness of the management. Let’s move straight to the sweetest part.
How dozens of affiliate programs lost tons of kilobucks
Around February 1, 2024, some customers of one of the largest and best (in my opinion) hosting providers, Hetzner, were very surprised. Their servers have been deleted. It was impossible to log into their personal accounst. Affiliate networks and teams that were hosted on Hetzner lost everything. There were no landing pages, no offers, no engine. Empty. By the way, the backups were also erased. Restoring was impossible.
And among the owners of AlterCPA Pro platform license there were also victims. How many people were affected by distribution on other engines? We’ll never know. But it is obvious that for many hours the traffic of thousands of affiliates went to the abyss. Or maybe days, because it’s not always possible to stop traffic in a second.
What will a smart affiliate marketer do if the affiliate network has sent his traffic into the abyss? Will demand compensation. The total damage to the market clearly exceeds $1,000,000 and unfortunately, the exact amount will remain a secret.
Who is guilty?
How many affiliate networks will survive? How many will collapse from the cash gap? We’ll see you soon, get your popcorn ready. What kind of clients are these? And why did someone lose everything, while others didn’t notice anything? Negligence of technicians or sanctions?
Back on December 15, 2023, Hetzner sent a letter to all its clients whose address indicated Russia. The main idea is that due to sanctions, they are forced to delete the accounts of all users whose mailing address includes the Russian Federation.
Having translated the text from the bureaucratic one, you can guess that the hosting in fact asks you to do one of two things:
- Change the “Postal address” setting to any outside Russia.
- Transfer all files to another hosting within one and a half months (until the end of January 2024).
The healthy person’s way
Still, Hetzner is an excellent hosting service for everyone in the arbitration market and beyond. It is extremely rare to ban anything – it warns in advance. That’s why we didn’t migrate the AlterCPA server from it. I just set our new legal address in the Seychelles in the settings. At the same time, there was no verification of the address, that is, you could put literally any address, even Antarctica, as long as it is outside Russia and Belarus.
We did the same for our clients who cooperate with us for the technical support of affiliate networks and arbitration teams service. None of them even know there was a danger.
Among AlterCPA’s clients, some of those who use their own technical support were affected. We, of course, notified them on our part, but we have no right to delve deeper into their affairs either due to our privacy policy or common sense.
The smoker’s way
A small company of deeply stoned idiots, dispersed throughout the world in various affiliate networks as techies, offered the market another solution. Don’t care. Literally don’t care and do nothing.
Their “don’t care” turned out to be a disastrous result. Each affiliate network lost from several thousand to several hundred thousand dollars in compensation.
What to do?
How to solve? How to prevent it? It is impossible to solve such cases. There is simply nothing to restore. All that could be done was to re-deploy the system as quickly as possible, which is what we were doing with our smoking heads on February 1-2. This is how we helped our affected clients.
What to do if this has already happened? The first solution is to at least fire your techies. As a maximum – a flight of your imagination, I will send the book “Torture and Executions of the Peoples of the World” in a personal message to everyone who wants it.
Just one piece of advice: they should not go unpunished and evade responsibility without fines or penalties. These employees committed criminal level negligence, which demonstrates a complete disinterest in performing their duties and a lack of responsibility.
Eternal advice
Provide your business – affiliate network or team – with normal technical support. If you don’t want to train adequate workers yourself or look for units throughout the market, it’s not a problem. Come to AlterCPA, we have built everything for you. Even if you work on a different engine, we will help you move to ours. We are the top in terms of arbitration technology, this will be confirmed by anyone who has interacted with me personally or with my company.