Oh yes! Another Hacked Website.
Oh yes!! Another Hacked Website
I have blogging for well over 12 years now. Last night I got a message from my downtime website software telling me that one of my websites was down.
So I typed in the url, and and low and behold I got a warning on Google Chrome that this site has been hacked, and the red warning screen.
For many people, getting their website hacked can be the turning point that makes them quit blogging.
Fortunately I am not so easily put off, and thankfully dealing with these hackers over the years. Has actually helped me to understand exactly,what to do when one of my websites get hacked.
One thing that can make a big difference is who you are actually hosting your websites with. I have at least 6 different hosting accounts. With many of these hosting companies I have had different issues.
Here are a few of them .
Liquid Web - My sites spent more times down than up. Never again.
Bluehost - Some of my plugins will not work on Bluehost this drives me mad
Hostmonster - If your websites get hacked, instead of helping to restore your site. They send you to some other company to fix your site. They charge you a fortune that way Hostmonster can get a nice commission.
Hostgator - Livechat can be slow, and it can take hours till they hand you up to the right department, but when they do at least they help you to restore your website. To the way it was before being hacked, that is if you are on a dedicated server with them. Not sure about their other packages.
WA Hosting - Has been very good and support is quick to fix your site, only downside I find is that some plugins will not work properly with it.
Hostinger - Has been very fast compared to all the other hosting accounts, but I have not yet had dealings with them when a website was hacked yet.
My worst ever hacking experience was at a time when I had 650 websites, I had a huge dedicated server with Hostgator and I had 350 of my websites hacked or defaced in one night.
Luckily Hostgator support worked all night while I slept getting them all secured and restored. So when I got up in the morning they where all fixed.
A few things I have learned from these experiences are
1. It's better to have your websites/blogs on multiple hosting accounts, that way all your sites will not get hacked at once.
2. Bigger more powerful servers even dedicated ones are not necessarily faster than a cheap $20 per month shared hosting account.
3. When your dedicated server goes down, the hosting companies do not care it's up to you to get on the ball and contact them to get it back up.
4. When a shared hosting goes down multiple people complain, so they will normally get it back up and running again fast.
5. Don't do paid advertising or send out emails with links to your site. If your hosting is weak or playing up. As it could cost you a fortune in wasted resources.
6. Be specific with customer support.. Assume they are idiots, tell them exactly what the problem is and what you want done. Otherwise they will be there all day messing around, and will not solve your problem.
7. Remember customer support get paid for sending messages and fixing websites. They are in no rush, You lose money while your websites are down, and also look bad to your customers and social network too.
8. If your hosting company refuse to fix or restore your websites there are many gigs on Fiverr available to fix a hacked website. Or remove malware or a defaced website. Big companies will charge you a fortune for this maybe hundreds of dollars. If you are careful when ordering the fiverr gig, it is possible to find someone to get your site fixed for $5.
There are a lot of other things you can do too but I will not go through them all here as this post could last forever. :-)
If you haven't already feel free to visit my websites and add me on the social networks .
To Your Successful Blogging
Sotiris Bassakaropoulos
Recent Comments
43
So sorry this happened to you (again!) I've been lucky. I've never been hacked so far. I only have a few sites though. Number 6 is my favorite. I wish I could get all the time back I spent with technical support at Hostgator and GoDaddy. My sites are hosted here at WA now and I haven't had a problem. Thank you for sharing your experience! Alanna
My mum had some of her WA sites hacked once but support sorted it pretty quickly.. Which is great.. :-)
Thanks Sotiris for great info. I'm trying to spread my sites over multiple hosting accounts too. Your post's very useful!
Sorry to read about your hacked site. I feel rather small with my 4 websites here at WA... :-)
I am going to do back-ups on all 4 today, in several place. Thanks,also, for all of the tips.
Best wishes and good luck,
Joe
Sounds like a plan Joe, if your stuff ever disappears you can always google wayback machine and probably find the most of your content again there.. :-)
More likely his clients and a bunch of his own sites. Although one can grow that big I suppose.. even with own websites. Just need some ghostwriters if you got 650 sites hahaha.
Nah I really think this is like a hosting site - or rather a bunch of client sites. Pretty sure that those 650 are not hosted here, or he would have to have a rather big amount of WA accounts.
Steven
I had 650 of my own websites at one stage not including sites I made for clients. I culled them down to about 200 of the best ones. A few years ago..
I have a dedicated server as well as multiple shared hosting accounts which I resell hosting on.
Good to have an experienced person here at WA. We can learn much from you on that topic.
I spread a good deal of my sites too, but have quite many here at WA currently.
Other than WA I, I use linode currently. Haven't experienced any hacks as of yet on these. On one other side I one had an unsafe upload field through a customer support site that gave me a bank fraud site somewhere. Up came lots of warning emails and threats from customers of banks. Terrible story and we got blacklisted for email fraud for a while. Managed to fix the leak and unblacklist the email server and life was good again.
Other than that I have had experience with truly bad shared hosting. I know the plugin problem, I've seen it too. Plan is to move those sites once they are getting big to a better hosting.
Thanks for the tips, I bookmarked your post.
Steven
I have had a lot of friends who sites got hacked at one time or another. So far, I have been lucky. Knock on wood.
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Thank you for sharing your experiences and also your helpful advises. I can’t even imagine having as many websites as you do but as you suggested, not hosting them all with the same provider is the islets thing to do.
Jerome