account

This is frustrating.

For the second time in the past couple of months, my website has been compromised of sorts.

This is the second time my account has been suspended — or threatened to be suspended — for apparently spam, warez or piracy.

Anyone who knows me knows that doing things like this is the furthest from things I can do. I’m not sure about anything the web host has sent me. It makes no sense whatsoever.

All I know is I never had these issues until upgrading my account a few months ago.

Since then, I’ve had all sorts of problems. And I’m obviously starting to get tweaked about it.

The latest happened Wednesday.

I didn’t know anything about it (I’ve been working on a blog post, ironically enough), when I got a call from a fellow geocacher who let me know. I checked, and sure enough, the account was suspended.

I then checked my e-mail and saw this:

“Dear Customer,

We have to suspend your account ‘XXXXX’ on ‘XXXXX’ server for hacking activity, this directly violates WHB AUP in section 1 [of the hosting policy]:

1. Spam, Warez, Piracy and Illegal Activities. WEB HOST does NOT permit any of it’s services to be used for illegal purposes. These include but are not limited to spam, unsolicited commercial email, warez hosting, piracy and hacking related activities. WEB HOST will remain the sole arbiter in what constitutes any of these activities. You acknowledge that participation in any of these activities will result in immediate termination without refund. WEB HOST may involve law enforcement authorities if we deem necessary.

You must reply to this ticket and confirm you understand this and will stop spam activity in order to get your VPS unsuspended.

We look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.”

This part was then followed by a bunch of technical stuff that apparently shows these things. I have NO idea what is happening or what all of this means.

All I know is that my site is suspended for something I did not do.

It appears that one of the themes I have on my site is an opening. Should things open soon, I’ll be deleting said theme (considering I don’t use it) as well as every other theme I don’t use.

So, I’m writing this blog post while I wait (three-plus hours) for a response from my host, which, up until now, has been splendid to deal with. This time, I’m getting quite annoyed quickly. Especially because I’ve been on live chat twice and been assured (the first one) that I would hear back within the hour.

Didn’t happen.

The latest person said they talked to tech support and I would be hearing soon. We’ll see.

I did hear soon after and was able to get my site back up and I’ve done everything I can to try and fix this issue. I have another ticket into the support desk to make sure I did all I could do and to see if they have any suggestions or ideas on how I can avoid this situation again. I don’t want to have a site that is down sometimes for something I didn’t even do.

So in the past year, after looking at the support tickets, I’ve dealt with this three times.

The first came in March, when apparently somebody complained about SPAM e-mail coming from one of my domains. I quickly kyboshed the e-mail account (it was never used, anyway) and put some blocks up. That seemed to work well and I didn’t have any other issues.

The second came in September, when I got a notice about some e-mail again — a SPAM thing.

” Dear Customer,

We have received complaint about sending SPAM from your account ‘XXXX’ to rr.com. You may see the notification below.

Would you please take the appropriate actions to stop SPAM sending to Road Runner email accounts, otherwise we’ll be forced to block/suspend your account.”

My site didn’t go down either of those times and both were taken care of quite quickly. Thankfully.

It’s frustrating because I don’t know what to do in some of these situations. One thing I need to make sure to do, once I get back on, is to upgrade each domain under my account and make sure everything is up to date.

That may be one issue because I only made sure to upgrade my blog. I have several other domains and I should make sure I get everything upgraded in those as well. Those are pretty stagnant as it is right now, so I need to do something with them to make sure everything works well.

I have since updated everything and made sure that no other plugins or anything had upgrades available. Hopefully that helped and things can move along easily enough.

Hopefully, this won’t happen again as it’s a frustrating situation.

I have another post I was working on for today, but that will have to wait until tomorrow as I obviously was dealing more with this today.

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog [at] gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook by clicking the button on the right side of the page!