Linux Admin Zone

Hosting my wordpress blog in GoDaddy was a big mistake, I realized this when one of my regular visitor alerted me that my blog is having suspicious activity. I promptly downloaded all of my blog files in my local system to scan and that operation took around 2 hours because of terrible FTP download rate from GoDaddy. Upon looking inside the files, almost all php files were having suspicious code and certainly infected by some malware. I did a clean of each and every file including database scan for any malicious records, users etc (referred this while cleaning). Uploaded all new files by replacing existing completely. I checked my logs and thought for a while about why such thing happened. My wordpress version was latest, strong FTP password and in fact no regular FTP activities from my side. I’ve Mac for myself. So I didnt’ found any reason and forgot that incident.

Suddenly after few days, same problem popped up. My friend complained that rss feed page of blog is not working. Now my eyebrow raised as I didn’t touched the site from my side since last cleanup (few days before) and entire blog files were again infected by that malware. Submitted a ticket with GoDaddy explaining everything but got lame response having points like We were unable to find any issue in your site, Make sure you are not running outdated version of blogging software blah blah.

When I searched over net about that issue, there were thousands of users having sites/blogs on GoDaddy who were facing same thing. I got many references/conversations like here and here indicating massive no. of users facing this issue. Whatever, I didn’t got any promising/supportive response from GoDaddy even after its very clear that hacking/malware spread was happened in their servers and instead of accepting and investigating, all they replying is crap.

This was a good indication for me to hunt another hosting provider and after lots of hunting, I zeroed down on nearlyfreespeech.net. These guys are simply awesome. Pay per usage plan, only SSH access (no FTP by default), very simple but intuitive interface and dirt cheap rates. I promptly shifted my personal/financial blog www.jagbir.in from GoDaddy to them and its now more than 3 months and honestly, I’m more than happy with them. Now going to shift this blog also very soon.

At the end, GoDaddy lost one more customer having several domains and deluxe linux hosting package.