I have to fully agree and actually formulate it a bit more drastic.

Do NOT(!!) run any ads on any website, no matter of its purpose.

What is the purpose of a website or blog we are putting up? To make money? Then we are in the wrong business. To safe money? The above example shows how easy it is to lose reputation, a good name, control over the content of the site, etc. that is worth much more then even a bit a pricier web hosting solution.
If the hosting is beyond our budget we have to come up with something other then a free service, I believe. In the above example it did cost the person $30/year. That is $2.50/month. I might think that it is possible to come up with a fundraising strategy to cover this cost. It is really not a lot. But IMHO this $30 bill gives some peace of mind valued higher then $2.50 we have save every month. Broken down further, since we never know when we might get hit with a nasty advertisement that is out of our control, is it worth the less then $0.09/day?

Think of it this way- About a Coke or a chocolate a month less (depending where you live, I guess...) will buy us an ads free blog.
That should be possible, right? If not, I dare think there is a bigger issue to deal with called addiction.

I just think, we are not giving up a wall of our building, a door of our car, or similar, for others to put ads up at will. Even though operating a car is much more costly then a blog or website.
Why are we doing that then with our online presence? I don't know. And in Wordpress' defence, it's not even really their fault that this ad comes up on our website. Well, yes, they allowed this ad within their ad service. But realistically we can't expect that a non-Christian business only allows ads acceptable by God's standards. Full Stop.
That's the same for every kind of ads-driven service. Be it Wordpress or any other kind of service, including the Google ads which some people willingly put on their sites.

If it comes to the point that we need to run our site on a more serious and therefore costly set-up, e.g. a VPS or straight out renting a whole server from a web host, we might need to revisit the non-ads idea.
However, at this point we can't rely a hosted service like the above, anyway. We might be able to find a sponsor for the site, e.g. a Christian business. Or we do go the advertisement route. But at this point we need to control those ourselves. Many, if not all CMS allow (either natively or via plug-in) for putting up custom ads.

So, yes, I am very strictly against ads on a website. Unless there is really a good reason for doing so. And even more important, a controlled environment for these ads. Otherwise you might get something as harmless as "books" related to your topic, or "spells that really work" or some "Viagra" ads. Who really knows and probably more often then not at a really inconvenient time. While you sit in a plane, your Base is out on a retreat, etc. and then, when you're back, you wonder about all those emails asking what's up with those ads about losing weight and things like that.

This whole thing seems sensationalized and way overblown. The blog was in no way “attacked” as the headline reads, the people who run the blog hosting site simply ran an ad that was disapproved by the blog creator. Tough, it’s not his site, the site belongs to the site owner who runs it according to the terms of service agreed to by the blogger. It’s simply not the blogger’s site, just simply where their blog is hosted, if you don’t like the terms of service go elsewhere or hodt you own blog on your own bandwidth and your own hardware under your own terms. That said, the point about retaining full editorial control including ads as to what is displayed when someone reads your blog is a good one.

The point is that if you run contextual advertising you are opening yourself up to the possibility of being targeted and attacked.

Running a Google AdWords campaign I can target specific sites and specific pages on those sites if they are running Google Adsense. This appears to be what happening to the blog I wrote about in the article.

I could, for example, target a YWAM blog with a "YWAM is a Cult" advertisement. You can actually get so specific as to only display the advertisements in certain countries. This means that if the ministry writing the blog is based in Australia I can choose to not display my advertisement in Australia, but still display the advertisement in every other country, thus keeping the person running the blog oblivious to my advertisement.

The point of writing the article is to help make people aware that this can happen and that, like you said, we need to make sure to maintain complete editorial control of everything being displayed on our site. Many people are not aware of the "dangers" of not maintaining this control and relying on free services.

There's the technical side of this, as well. Have you heard of XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks? This basically means that if you allow another website (i.e. Facebook) to put code on your page, you have automatically opened up your website to a huge security risk, which, in the right hands, will allow someone to post content to your site without needing authorization to do so.

Therefore, as a best practice, do *not* allow any website to have access to your website's code for any reason. In other words, don't allow advertisements on your site that you are not directly adding yourself.

Here is the official "how-to" on preventing XSS attacks:

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_%28Cross_Site_Scripting%29_Preventio...

Thanks,
~Chris

Talking about do not put ads on your website. Could anyone give example of web hosting company that is good enough for a low cost? I guess many ministries in ywam wanted to put up a website for community, information, educate, etc purposes but don't have that budget. Then in the end a free web hosting is the last resort. So guys with IT knowledge please give examples and advice for these people..

Thanks

I host my ministry and personal web-sites on HostGator, which has single domain plans starting at $3.96 per month. The support has been pretty good and my uptime has been excellent.

What else are people using? I'm curious...

I've been using Dreamhost for a while and have really been happy for what it is. If you go on a monthly basis, it's $10.95/mo., but you could very easily host several sites and domains and run them as separate entities and give each domain's manager a separate login to manage their portion of the account. And by doing that, you could very easily share the hosting cost. In addition, I just found out that if you have a US 501(c)3 non-profit organization, Dreamhost will give you hosting for free.

Also, domain registrations through Dreamhost is only $9.95/year.

Tech support has been incredible and very quick. And if your site gets bigger, you can easily move to a virtual private server (VPS) starting at $15/mo. which I have done and it's been awesome.

I'm currently in the very slow process of migrating 3 websites for YWAM Latvia and YWAM Estonia over to my Dreamhost account. The biggest slowdown is my schedule!

Bless you.

In my personal experience (your mileage might vary) it often depends on the server your web site ends up to be. Overselling a server is rather common practice. The hosts hope that not all of the people on the server actually makes use of the complete package, as in using the maximum of advertised disk space, databases, etc. This is basically how cheap hosting is possible.
So, it depends...

What I mean by this is, for example, I use 1&1 for a couple sites without any issues since roughly 10 years. No down time, no speed issues, nothing. Just runs as smooth as one would like it to be. Others, however, have written in forums, etc. that they had very bad experience and recommend people to stay away from them.
But from my point of view, I see no issue with 1&1. I can't even tell you how the support is since I never needed to contact them in any way.

Another example is IPower.com.
We have a few sites there on multiple independent accounts. We keep some sites completely separate from others due to the sensitivity of the content.
So, while some sites mainly run smooth and without major problems, we have other sites that are a causing trouble far too often. Unfortunately, it's not only related to the technical aspects but also billing. Writing a support ticket, while answering timely, is close to pointless, I mainly get answers that are not helpful, sometimes unrelated, or worse. Phone support and Live Chat usually was good and helpful.
Once one of our sites got suspended because we apparently had content hosted that violated the TOS (we had to delete specific file types). There was no warning to it. However, the TOS is worded in a way that you can interpret it in various different ways. This basically meant that one of the major parts of this web site had to be deleted. Thankfully we found another solution to host these files.

So, with IPower I have a very mixed experience. However, due to the, partially, very "unfortunate" things that happened I simple can not recommend them but rather tell people to stay away.

While not having any personal experience with Dreamhost, I often hear about good reports with them. I'd say their overall reputation is rather good.

Also without any personal experience but often looked at as rather controversial (specifically from Christian circles) is GoDaddy. There are mixed quality reports about their hosting service. However, from a Christian point of view their advertisements are often looked at as not acceptable, due to their sexual reference.

Netdirekt.net and Hetzner.de are 2 German web hosts (both with English speaking sites). Also, with these I don't have personal experience, but I personally know people who are hosting with these providers without any issues.
However, Netdirekt does not offer cheap / single site hosting packages, only VPS (Virtual Private Server) or more expensive types. So, if you don't have a need for at least a VPS this is not a provider for you.
Hetzner offers packages starting at 1.90€/month. As so often, you get what you pay for.