Yet again, I am seeing a rising number of sites that are reporting getting hacked at GoDaddy. It is also no surprise to me that people are getting limited responses from them when they try and find out what is going on. The GoDaddy blog mentions nothing recently aside from when they were hacked 2 weeks ago on Halloween (an attack that looks like it stemmed from GoDaddy not acting on a security advisory for 11 days). The thing is, I know from personal experience that they are aware of it, because I have seen cases where they are cleaning clients sites now automatically as a form of damage control, before the clients even know they were hacked, in an attempt to keep the buzz down about it. So they obviously know it is happening yet they are still keeping tight lipped about it, and being reactive instead of proactive, which is of course par for the course when it comes to getting hacked on GoDaddy.
Since this is an established pattern with them as a web host, and even though I still highly recommend them as registrars for domain names, I have decided to make this offer to all clients who want to be done with getting their sites hacked. If you hire me to clean your hacked website(s), WordPress or otherwise (since pretty much any site on GoDaddy is subject to getting hacked), and are willing to switch to Hostgator after I have you completely cleaned up (which is where this blog and many of my other sites are hosted, and a host that I highly recommend), then I will do the migration at no extra charge.
That’s right… I’ll move you to Hostgator, for free.
Now, if you want to help me out a little with that, and use the affiliate links in this post or the banner in my sidebar to purchase your hosting, then great, I will get a commission from them for doing it. But that is in no way required for this offer, and not at all why I am making this deal. You can manually type in hostgator.com into your browser, or click on a friend’s banner, or whatever. I’ll still move you for free. Everyone should have safe hosting, period, and I am willing to help people get there.
The one caveat with this offer is if you have emails stored on the old server, and use either IMAP or their webmail, and you need those old emails (not the accounts, but the actual emails) moved off of GoDaddy and stored elsewhere, then it does take a few extra minutes per email account, depending on which solution you which to use. GoDaddy doesn’t give you direct access to download and move them, but there are a couple of workarounds available. Some you can do yourself if you like (like downloading all of the emails to your local computer using POP3), some I can do for you for a very small charge. Other than that for each site I clean I will move it to the new Hostgator account for you at no charge, and that includes the files, the databases, setting up the email accounts, and any ftp users you want to move.
If you are not currently hacked, and want to move to Hostgator anyway, I’ll still offer anyone who wants it a deal. If it does not need cleaning, I will migrate your entire site for only 30 minutes worth of labor, flat fee, again not counting the moving of the physical emails. If you have multiple sites that need moved, depending on the sizes of them, I can offer you further discounts on those as well. Hell, you don’t even have to be hosted at GoDaddy to take advantage of this offer. If you’re unhappy where you are at, just let me know.
Anyone who wants to have me get started on moving them to a better host should contact me today.
