Tell HN: Netfirms webhost scanning files and disabled my account

1 point

12 years ago

Just a heads up, if anyone uses Netfirms (or considers doing so) for shared hosting. A week ago all of my sites suddenly went down. I had a couple personal sites, a family business website, a friends cooking blog that I manage, etc. Upon calling them, they informed me that my account had "malicious files" on it and was disabled, but it was okay because "they emailed me that morning". They would re-enable it immediately if I subscribe for "SiteLock".

Turns out that I had an old wordpress installation in a sub-sub-directory that got compromised (had some shell script injected in it.) So, they disabled my account and told me I could pay them to enable SiteLock and they would bring it back up, OR I could handle it myself and email them when I was done and they would re-enable my account in 24-48 hours. Upon request for information on what SiteLock is, I got "there are bad people out there trying to get your information, and it stops them".

I know shared hosts are inherently bad, but I don't really feel like managing my own LAMP, ftp, smtp, domain routing, etc, so I've held on to my Netfirms account for 10 years for simple websites. Is there a good shared host that anyone uses? Or am I just uniquely lazy?