Currently Experiencing Website Issues? Diagnose For Free Now – Click Here
A snapping strike, just like a snakebite out of nowhere taking down your website as quickly as venom will incapacitate your body. It comes in many forms. Malware. Hacked. Website Virus. Your hosting account suspended. A crushing blow. An uninvited thorn in the side of your busy day.
When it happens, there are many services to clean your infected website, but why do you need to pay extra to fix and protect your site? The truth is most hosting providers don’t offer this in your plan. We’ll take a look into why this is and what you can do to avoid this being an issue, now and long term.
First of all let me introduce myself, Mike Brennan here with Developer Squad. We’ve been in the web development business for a long time and have seen it all in our dozen plus years of experience. Web hosting is a key component of our work so we’ve used most of the companies out there today in one way or another. The sad reality is most aren’t desirable and have one shortcoming or another.
Let’s say your website is infected with malware, has been hacked, or shows signs of a pesky virus. This can disrupt your website and business or cause your visitors or customers to lose trust. You also have the headache of cleaning the mess up which will cost both time and money. Ugh. It’s a hassle. These attacks are more common today than in any point in the history of the web.
A few years ago we started to see a spike in our own clients’ websites experiencing attacks. A lot of the time it would be costly to fix and in some cases bring the website down for a period of time. WordPress sites could have hundreds or thousands of malicious files that would need to be cleaned up, taking the site offline while we worked on it.
We tried tools and services with varying degrees of success. Certain ones were costly or took too long to clean up the mess. My business partner Jon and I were baffled. How could this be such a persistent issue and there wasn’t a knock out solution that was affordable and fast? Why don’t the web hosting companies take care of this? It’s taking place on their servers so you’d think they would step in and provide assistance.
After over a year and a half and many thousands of sites later we came to some conclusions. Web hosting companies offer cheap or discounted “shared” hosting accounts where they just stuff as many sites as they can on a server and not maintain it. This leaves sites vulnerable as if one site is compromised it’s possible to spread to others on the same server. We found the web hosts to be like absentee landlords, leaving their “tenants” to their own devices to fix these problems. On top of that, some of the hosts partner with Third Party Providers who sell you on their malware cleaning or hack and virus solutions when your site is already down and you are vulnerable, taking a cut of the sale.
Finding out that your website is infected with malware is a terrible time to find out the truth about your web host. Attacks on websites and site infections are becoming far too common. If this has happened to you, you may be searching for a quick fix to get your site back online and functioning normally. Still, your first thought may have been, “Shouldn’t my hosting company have taken care of this?” Many of us think since malware and viruses are such a problem, our web host would have things in place to keep this from happening. Once we discover that might not be true, we believe that they will help us get it fixed.
The first step is realizing that your current problem is just a symptom and your web host is the real problem. They aren’t doing anything to protect your site, and when things go wrong, they expect you to pay their “partner” to get rid of the viruses or malware. The next step is finding a cure, a host that takes steps to keep your website safe and is ready to help with no additional charge if your site does get infected.
If you are searching for a solution for your infected website, fix it the right way, we recommend our friends over at People’s Host. They’re reputable and can get you going in the right direction on the path to clean websites that stay that way.
More Resources:
More Scanning Tools
DIY Tips To Remove Website Malware
Clean And Fix Website Now (non Hosting switch option)