Ask Paul: August 2 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We survived a silly outage last night, so I'm more ready than ever to get started on the weekend and little downtime. And this is a great place to start.
But first, a message from our sponsors
Yesterday was busy enough to begin with: I had a Hands-On Windows recording scheduled for 4:30, and those days are always oddly stressful, in part because I've had so many technical issues despite the hours I spend before each recording making sure everything is working properly. But I wrapped up my prep work earlier than usual, and I was pretty pleased about that.

With some unexpected free time to kill, I started writing up a few articles ahead of the recording. I had just posted about Apple trying to get its US antitrust case dismissed (good luck with that) and had moved on to a post about the Arc browser coming to Windows 10. As you would expect of such a post, I wanted to link to our previous posts about Arc for Windows, so I searched Thurrott.com for "Arc," switched back to Word, wrote a bit, and then returned to the browser. But instead of my website with the search results, there was that familiar Cloudflare outage page.

I wasn't worried. Thanks to the diligent work of Robert and his team of developers, Thurrott.com has been in great shape for a long time, and we've not had any of the weird outages that proved so problematic in the (pre-Robert) past. I figured it was just a temporary glitch. So I refreshed. And waited. And refreshed. And waited. And … it never came back.

I contacted Robert. As always, he responded immediately and got to work. In short order, he discovered that Cloudways, our hosting provider, had pulled us offline—without warning, mind you—because of a DMCA violation. I knew what meant, and so do you if you read How the Mighty Have Faceplanted (Premium): That bullshit complaint that I thought was already resolved was not resolved. It's just that no one thought to tell me.

The rest of this is a haze. In time, we discovered that the decision to pull the site offline had been made by Cloudways because Digital Ocean, the service that was hosting our images, demanded it: They, like Cloudflare and Cloudways, had apparently received the same (bullshit) DMCA violation notification from the same India-based security bot that had triggered this episode. But Digital Ocean, unlike Cloudflare and Cloudways, never brought this to my attention. The only communication I got from them this past month was to let me know I had paid my monthly bill.

I went into the Hands-On Windows recording in a foul mood, as you can imagine. But the recording actually went off without a hitch, which is rare, and I got three episodes done in about 50 minutes, which is fantastic. And then it was back into the shit.

The rest of this is, likewise, a haze. Robert and I separately reached out Cloudways and Digital Ocean support repeatedly. Cloudways responded each time, but was useless, as if only the B team was at work. Digita...