Welcome to my new Squarespace site. Yes, for many years I advocated for Wordpress on Hostgator. But those days are over and its all thanks to hackers. Now I'm onto a more modern platform where everything I want to do isn't such a giant pain in the ass to implement. While I really liked my old custom self coded template, I'm happy to move away from wordpress and hostgator for basically the same money. Their time has past.
A few weeks ago I started getting emails from something called SiteLock. They wanted somewhere between $3-$180/month to scan and protect sites hosted on Hostgator. I apparently was "gifted" the service and they were there to tell me that I have been hacked and my site includes malicious software. Sure enough I found the code and removed it, I also deleted some foreign php files. The worst was my personal site where I found folders full of html ads for some asian online store. I deleted all of those and my sites came back online and seemed free of any bad code. I updated my wordpress and security plugins, then changed my password, and thought the battle had been won as it had been years ago.
A week later I got a phone call from SiteLock. "Hello, I am calling from SiteLock. Hostgator gifted our basic service to you and we have found malicious software on three of your sites. Oh wait, four of your sites." Later that day the malicious code was in fact on that forth site that was previously clear. Seem pretty suspicious.
The whole thing felt like a shakedown, and comments online only affirmed instincts. Clearly the hackers, whoever they are, have access to the server over at Hostgator. My choice is between, paying this company that Hostgator has partnered with, or abandon my hosting and move the site.
Thanks hackers and SiteLock, Hostgator has lost a customer and I've taken the opportunity to update my sites.