The Planet is one of HostGators Servers

Well MomsCashBlog is finally back online and I couldn’t be happier, it has been a trying time for me and I’m sure that everyone is wondering what the heck happened this time. I’ll tell you it was the same as before, but with a longer length of time. It also was much more involved and that’s what took the time.
This really took a lot out of me and I will tell you honestly if it wasn’t for my new theme that has me really jazzed and all of the positive feedback from all of you, I think I would of thrown in the proverbial towel. I can’t say that this came at a good time (never a good time) with bills, & health concerns, but hey we are all dealing with something… I can’t complain or shouldn’t. Life must go on. I didn’t want this to be a long drawn out post, but I feel that the whole story must be told in order to let some people know what is going on and to calm the nerves of those that are worried about visiting my blog.

HostGator and MomsCashBlog’s Correspondence

Dear Sir/Ma’am,
I have been a loyal HostGator customer for several years now however, over the past couple of months, my website has been infected to no end that is making me reconsider my choice of choosing HostGator as my hosting co. I have always received prompt responses to emails and things of that nature, however the infections in my website are causing me to be offline for several days at a stretch and resulting in the loss of substantial amounts of income.

The “Reported Attack Page” that Google has put up on my website displays servers that my website has been hosted on. One of them includes AS21844 – THE PLANET. Upon further research, it turns out that ThePlanet is actually HostGator but more importantly, the AS21844 server has several instances of infections. On the Google Webmaster Tools admin panel, it suggests that I refer to a guide on the Stop Badware blog that you may have heard of as well. On the same blog is this post that really worries me ( http://blog.stopbadware.org/2010/07/06/what-we-learned ). In that, it states that AS21844 (the server I am hosted on) actually is one of the Top 50 most infected networks.

Although there may be other factors affecting my website, it seems as though the biggest red flag is being hosted on that particular server. Furthermore, if you search for ThePlanet on StopBadware or even AS21844 (http://blog.stopbadware.org/live_search?q=AS21844) you will come up with several instances of this taking place. My webmaster has informed me that instead of switching hosts that I should request to be put on another server on HostGator. Furthermore, he informed me that HostGator should upgrade my SSL version from 2.0 to 3.0 because security does get compromised because of it as well. These are precautionary measures and I am attempting to give HostGator one more last chance before I look elsewhere.

I really hope that you can resolve these issues and get back with me while I attempt to clean my website of any issues that it is dealing with.
Best Regards,
JJ from MomsCashBlog.com

HostGators Reply

Our servers host tens of thousands of websites each, and I think I’d be hard pressed to find one among our thousands of servers that Google doesn’t think there’s malware of some kind on. This is a very common issue, and it does not affect you directly. The problem isn’t with the malware on the server, but the fact that Google doesn’t remove sites from the malware database until the site owner asks them to. Some site owners don’t take a very active role in maintaining their sites, so it could take months for the sites to be removed, even if they’ve been clean all along.

We will not be able to move your sites between servers, as this will not solve these problems. Have you requested that your site be removed from the malware site database yet?

MOMSCASHBLOG’S FEELINGS…
First of all, of course I had requested that Google remove my blog from the malware database. That would be the first thing that one would do, when something like this is happening. All of this time I’m worried about my traffic,losing money that I’m trying to make, to pay for those health insurance bills that are no longer being payed by our insurance companies. Hoping I can get my regular readers coming back to my blog and that I can get the new ones come to my blog. When one looks at the “this site may harm your computer” sign, it’s not an invitation like, welcome to my home come on in. I did know however that some of the bloggers would know that by the time that warning was on my page, it meant Google had already taken my site down, so the chances of harming your computer are almost zero. You also realize that Google had also put a block on my SERP (Google’s search engine result pages). Which means if someone should try to look up  MCB or maybe my tutorial or how to make money online with one’s blog, my blog’s name would not come up on the search without a warning. Not only could I possibly be losing traffic, but I’m losing revenue all of this time.

I must tell you that I can’t help but feel badly for the new blogger whoever it may be, that knows nothing about the tech part of blogging and is hit with something like what I’ve been through. You know what would happen? Another blog that just dies, a blogger that gives up & is forced to quit something, that they were hoping to make a go at. One thing I would suggest at this time, to any new blogger who should encounter one of these “warnings, or have any kind of problems” is to reach out to someone in your blogging community. You will find that there is always someone out there willing to help you, it is a very helpful community.

I am “not a tech savvy blogger” at all, I have to call on help when something like this comes up. This is where I have to give kudos to my dear friend Enkay, who did a lot of investigating for me and fix whatever we were suppose to fix on our end. The rest however is what we found out about HostGator and ThePlanet being together, one is a server for the other. The hosting company here is HostGator and THEPLANET is one of their many servers. I’m not suggesting anything nefarious but I will tell you when I did confront HostGator by email, I felt that their response was a little on the rude side. In fact one of the “Support Techs” in an email did apologize for the way another SupportTech guy had phrased an email, but in his email he suggested that maybe we didn’t really know what we were talking about, and “maybe the facts that you received are incorrect.” Read the two links that are provided above.

I’ve always had a great relationship with Hostgator in fact I’m considered a super affiliate for them, not sure if that’s any big deal but I have done and still sell quite a bit of hosting for them. My intentions are to continue selling hosting for them, but I was hoping that I would of been treated a little bit better. Hoping for some understanding and real communicating between the both of us would of been the perfect outcome, but instead in my opinion I felt like HG was not taking my situation as serious as it was to me. I’ve never received any email from anyone at MCB explaining about the articles that I had found in stopbadware. Which still makes one wonder what’s up?