Why HostGator should be shot!

I do not condone poaching. Animals in the wild should be left alone. Humans have done enough damage to the world. Killing an animal for entertainment is evil. I really believe that.

There is one exception. Host Gator. That reptile needs to be hunted, skinned and turned into a shoe. Not just any shoe. I want their leather to be turned into a cheap shoe that will be sold on the corner for a dollar or two.

Sounds petty? Yes. I’m aware of how it sounds. But that’s just how I’m feeling right now!

Host Gator Vs. Marks Angry Review

Most of my rants and reviews are not personal stories, but rather opinions of how I believe companies should behave. This rant was an actual experience. Almost out of the cartoons. And when looking online I realized that I wasn’t the only one who had a similar experience and I decided to speak out.

Here’s the short version of the story. It’s pretty shocking.

Last month a hacker infiltrated hostgator’s server, attacked a few of my website and injected over a million spam files onto their server.

Yes, over 1 million. It wasn’t like a few hundreds spam files went unchecked and hostgator were having a bad day. It was over a million files that landed onto their servers over 1 month period. These files were either corrupt or simple HTML files used for black-hat SEO techniques. These files should have easily been noticed by Host Gator’s security team.

Naturally, it took me a week or two to realize that I had been attacked. Hostgator didn’t inform me. I found out through a Google warning. I put 2 and 2 together and realized that I was the victim of an elaborate hacking.

It Gets Worse

Now, here is where the story gets ridiculous and somewhat unbelievable. I contacted hostgator and asked them to locate and fix the malware. It was their shared server that was hacked. I’m paying a monthly fee to them. It seems only fair that this would be their responsibility.

But it turns out that life cannot be so simple…

After waiting on the phone for ages. I finally got through to customer service. It turns out that they managed to flip this issue onto me.

“You have exceeded your memory on our server,” they told me. “Please remove excess data and then we will run a security check.” As I was talking to them, they decided it would be a good idea to penalize me and take down my websites.

“The reason I have exceeded the limit,” I said, trying to be as polite as possible. “is because a hacker managed to inject a million files onto the network.”

“Well we can’t fix it and remove it for you until you remove the files…” he said.

They proceeded to explain that I had to manually (1 file at a time) delete all the spam files and then they would run a security check to find and destroy all the spam.

Host Gator’s Customer Service

I tried to explain the obvious stupidity. My blood pressure was rising.

I spoke politely and broke it down into simple words. The guy let me speak. He even acknowledged that there was a slight problem with his suggestion, but then repeated that they could only help me remove the spam once I had already removed the million files of spam, manually, 1 file at a time.

I wish this was a joke. It isn’t. I called up 4 more times and received the same idiotic response.

So far I have spent over 5 hours manually removing file. Most of the initial websites are still infected. Don’t worry MarksAngryReviews.com wasn’t attacked…

The worst part about this story is that I until last week I used to recommend Hostgator to people. I singled them out as one of the companies that actually care about the consumer. And now I feel like an idiot.

I’ve sent a link to Hostgator and if they respond I will publish it.

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Update: When prompted on twitter for a response. Here’s what they responded: We do not comment publicly about our customer’s accounts.