A Growth Industry
Recently the number of sites being hacked or infiltrated has risen rapidly. We see a lot of distraught site owners who have had their sites damaged, experienced a loss of rankings, or had data stolen.

Use Protection
Although most good hosting companies will protect their servers (and usually your site to some degree) it’s important to understand that you are responsible for your own site.

Take this analogy: You can use the strongest safe in the world, but if you leave the door open and someone empties it, you can’t blame the safe manufacturer.

Hacked Huh?
Before we offer you some simple tips, it’s worth understanding a few basics about the different kinds of hacks, their purpose and how they can affect you.

We won’t go into detail at this stage, but the number of exploits and the number of different types are increasing. Some of the most common include: XSS, SQL Injections and defacing

Staying up to date is a full time job, but like most types of crime, being prepared and protecting yourself should give you a better chance of weathering a storm should it happen.

So without further ado, here’s a basic primer on protecting your site from being hacked when it’s on shared hosting.

Simple Security Tips

1. Keeping Software Up to Date
If you are running old versions of software chances are it’s insecure, make sure you upgrade to the latest release. Most updates to software are security or functionality related, which means if you aren’t running the latest version you are likely to have missed a few security fixes.

2. 3rd Party Scripts and Code
Plugins, widgets or any other code (including free templates and themes) you install are written by other people under unknown circumstances. Some may be great, some may be full of holes. Be sure to research any code you want to use that you didn’t write yourself. Even a few Google searches should help you find out how secure the code you are using is.

3. Your Own Fault
One of the biggest causes of Identity theft and an easy way for someone to get details to your site(s). Your own computer is likely to be a weak link in the chain. Whether it be from poisoned powerpoint files or someone phishing your account details, the vulnerabilities are limitless. No matter how secure your site is, if the machine you access it from (including logging in and editing etc.) is not secure you stand a good risk of being compromised and it may affect more than just your site. …

We are happy to announce that we are having a sale on a batch of servers that we had leftover. Some of you may remember these servers being our former Pro Dedicated offering. For those who are not familiar with these former Pro Dedicated specifications:

Processor: Intel Xeon Conroe 3060 server @ 2.4Ghz

Memory: 4GB DDR2

Hard Disk: 4 x 500GB SATA under RAID-10 configuration.

Monthly Bandwidth: 2,500GB @ 10mbps

IP Addresses: 10

OS: CentOS 4.6

Control Panel: cPanel/WHM 11 with Fantastico included.

Pricing: $350 per Month.

This is a great solution for those needing a high performance server with large data storage with redundancy. Under the RAID-10 configuration, risk of data loss would be minimized as the information is mirrored throughout all 4 hard drives. In case a hard drive fails, copies of your data should be stored on the remaining 3 hard drives. At the price of $350 per month, this server definitely provides the most bang for your buck.

This was a very popular dedicated solution when it debuted as our Pro Dedicated package, and we are very excited to be able to offer these servers to you once again. Please keep in mind that stock is limited and once we sell out, this offer will not be available for quite some time.

If you are interested in this offer, please email us at sales@hostgator.com and put it in attention to our Dedicated Sales Department.

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That’s right, the folding@home hostgator.com team is a reality and we’ve broken into the top 1,000 ranked teams!

Although we’ve kept this fairly low profile on our forum post here , we do have a large amount of users starting to come on board, so I’d like to present something a hosting company is doing to better the world.

The Folding@Home project by Stanford University is a distributed computing project used to create one of the largest supercomputers in the world. The client has long been used used as both a metric to measure processors and machines efficiency and also to help the cause. The project is distributed much in the way Seti@Home was, however, with a more direct human goal.

Just in case you’re wondering, “what is protein folding and why does this matter to me?”; the Folding@Home project simulates complex mathematical formulas about how these proteins fold, unfold, and misfold with the goal to hopefully one day learn better how many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes actually work and occur. Results? Darn right! The project has already come up with a number of notable scientific results, and is with our help and yours, continues to go somewhere tangible as you can see at Stanford’s whitepage papers …

Ok folks, I know you have been waiting for a while, and I have had a lot of you ask me when the new Windows hosting will be available? Well I am happy to let you know that now you can purchase a Windows dedicated server. First I want to say this is just the beginning of what we will be offering for Windows hosting, so stay tuned for further announcements.So what does having your own Dedicated Windows Server offer you? You will receive the latest Plesk 8 interface for setting up your website, email etc… The Windows environment will allow you to use ASP. You can choose which version will best fit your needs along with your choice of MSSQL, MYSQL, and Access database connections which will be available at all times for you to create and take advantage of simultaneously.

Do you need a server fast? Your Windows server will be provisioned, secured and delivered within 24 hours of purchase, and we will provide you with monthly server management at no additional cost.

So I have given you the scoop, and now I am offering the first 5 people that purchase a Windows dedicated server from reading this blog a $100 dollar discount on your first month purchase. In order to receive this dicount you must email me at jgarcia(at)hostgator.com.

This is a first come first serve deal and this discount may NOT be combined with other offers, so if you want to get your first month at a reduced price you better act quick before its over. I will give anyone who emails me for this deal a 24 hour window to complete the purchase, then I will offer it to the next person in line. …

Very rarely is a peep heard from our Toronto Office, the dedicated team of Administrators in Toronto usually keep their nose to the grind-stone and help keep our servers running in tip-top shape. They may keep to themselves, however their efforts certainly do not go un-noticed. Much to this point, they recently received an amazing gift from a very satisfied client.

Late, on a recent Saturday evening, the Toronto Technical Staff were shutting down their computers and preparing to call it a night when they received an urgent message from one of the Chat Techs at the Houston office. It seems that one of our client’s dedicated servers had taken a turn for the worse and crashed due to a mysterious software misconfiguration. The Chat Tech looked high and low for an available administrator to help our frantic client, but no admins were free to assist with the immediate issue. The Toronto Technical Staff gladly dropped what they were doing, canceled their plans for the evening and continued to burn the proverbial “Midnight Oil” until they had resolved the issue and restored the server to its original state.

“Every minute my site is off line… “, the client told us, “I lose, potentially, hundreds of prospective customers, and that just won’t do!”

The Toronto Team understands the needs of high availability websites and were glad to do everything they can to get this customers site back online in a timely fashion.

As a reward for their efforts, the client purchased tickets to a Toronto Raptors game on January 9, 2008 for the entire staff.

When asked what they thought of the tickets, the Toronto Staff said they were very grateful for the gift, but they had done nothing heroic and, in fact, what they had done was “all in a day’s work”.

Below is a snapshot of our staff in Toronto, and we’ll be sure to follow up with pictures of the game!

Pictured from left to right: Adrian P, Dave C, James N, Michael Y

Our data center gave us a great deal on a batch of servers and we have some leftovers. While supplies last, I’m offering these servers to our blog readers only. Below are the spec’s:

Processor: Intel Pentium D 3.40GHz
RAM: 2 GB
Hard Disk: 250 GB
Bandwidth: 1,500 GB (10mbps)
OS: CentOS 4.5 (linux)
Control Panel: cPanel/WHM with Fantastico

We’ll be selling these for just $174/mth with basic management. If you have a look at our dedicated server page, you’ll see that our normal $174/mth server is the Basic Dedicated server. For the same price you’ll get all the same features, plus better hardware. Basically this means 2x the RAM, and 3x the Hard Disk space with a much faster processor.

This is a blog only special. The stock is available on a first come, first serve basis. Offer valid for new and existing clients that do not already have a dedicated server with HostGator. After these are sold, we won’t be able to get this server again at this price.

If you’ve been interested in upgrading to a dedicated server, please email me chad (@) hostgator.com. …

Is HostGator “selling out”?

As many of you may already know, we have updated our shared hosting and reseller hosting plans yesterday. The plans went from crazy to just downright insane in terms of us adding HUGE amounts of disk space and bandwidth without increasing the price. I’m going to do my best to explain the whole situation and assure you that the new plans aren’t going to put HostGator out of business.

We have many customers who are going hysterical from being so happy about the plan increases. These are the same customers with whom the majority were using less then 1% of the old plan. It’s like going into an all you can eat buffet and being told you can eat more. I really don’t understand why everyone gets so excited because all we really did was go from unlimited to more unlimited.
Yes I said unlimited! The forbidden word we use to worn potential hosting customers to stay away from, and now HostGator has officially sold out and joined the competition with offering scam plans (we actually did this the last time when we increased our plans, but shhhh).

What exactly is unlimited? Well, I just got done going to the top 5 largest web hosting companies I could think of and the lowest plan I could find was for a few 100 gigs of disk space with thousands of gigs of bandwidth for less then $10 a month. These are all scam plans because like most hosts we have something called a Terms of Service that mentions CPU and memory limits. It is close to impossible to use what we are all selling you without being suspended for going over CPU and memory.

Of course many of you reading this will be shocked and rush off to one of our competitors to ask them if you can really use all the disk space and bandwidth without being suspended, and I’m positive they’ll tell you yes. In fact, my employees would have told you the same thing if they didn’t read this blog post.

Just ask yourself one thing…

How do all us shared web hosting companies sell more disk space and bandwidth for ten bucks then the dedicated server providers sell for hundreds? …