Help my Site Has Been Hacked
Written by ady on May 11, 2008 – 12:44 am -
It’s not the inconvenience or even the loss of money that gets me pissed. Its the fact someone else is making money from my hard work. Its like leaving a pack of cigarettes on the bar while you go to the back room and coming back to find them gone. They don’t cost that much, you can get some more from the machine, does that make you feel better? Does it hell because someone is smoking cig’s that you paid for.
It wasn’t malicious or anything like that, no banner screaming the rights of Wolves, Badgers or Elves. Just a simple case of robbery. The site is a nice little earner about building patio’s and decking. It makes me around $25 a day from Adsense and at this time of year a fair few affiliate sales a week of varying amounts. The robber simply replaced all my pages with a page best described as a domain parked page with plenty of ads on.
The site was one of my originals, built well before I discovered the benefits of hosting like WebHostingBuzz. I have it hosted with a company called studentwebhosting.co.uk and I’ve been bombarding them with emails and support tickets since Thursday lunch with absolutely no response so far and I’m guessing there won’t be any now until Monday at the earliest. What makes you laugh is the ticket system has a priority rating for your message with various choices from low to critical and I’d hate to think how long the response rate would be if I had rated it less than critical.
The thing about having your site hacked is that unless you have chosen a stupidly easy to work out password or using a very old version of WordPress, chances are the hack is the fault of your host and nothing to do with you. Shit happens and it can’t be helped but if this site had been on one of my reseller hosting accounts or on WebHostingBuzz where I now keep all my decent earning sites, the problem would have been sorted in around an hour.
At least there is a lesson in here…choose your hosting carefully. The last ticket I put in about an hour a go requested the EPP codes for all the other domains I have hosted with them so I can transfer them to WebHostingBuzz. In the meantime some t**t is making money from my traffic and it seems there is nothing I can do about it.
The alarm bells rang at christmas when a blog I had with them reached its bandwidth quota by the 20th of the month and there was no way of purchasing additional bandwidth without contacting them. I did try several times but the site ended up being down until the beginning of January when I could finally log in via ftp and download everything to move it to WebHostingBuzz.
A small hosting company is ok if all you want is your own personal site but for anything else stick wiith the big companies. There is a reason they are big and everyone uses them.
I have several reseller hosting accounts where I start my new sites off and then once they are getting decent traffic and making enough money to justify it I move them to WebHostingBuzz and also purchase a dedicated IP address for them. Its a system that works well for me and I should have tidied up the loose ends a long time a go. You live and learn!
Tags: my site has been hacked, studentwebhosting.co.uk, webhostingbuzz
Posted in Life Of An Internet Marketer |
