We are having an increasing number of calls from clients asking us to fix their hacked GoDaddy shared hosted Joomla website. While many may see this as an indication that GoDaddy has many customers, we see the whole thing a bit differently.
The thing is, a few months ago, we only had a few GoDaddy hosted hacked Joomla websites to fix every month, but these days, we’re getting 3-4 a day! So, it’s not like GoDaddy’s clients jumped 30 times overnight, and it’s not like our clients jumped 30 times overnight. Something’s fishy, and, so we decided to investigate further.
It didn’t take us long to get down to the bottom of the problem, GoDaddy’s shared hosting servers all (well, at least all the ones that we have worked on) suffered from the ImageMagick vulnerability. GoDaddy, so far, has not taken the appropriate action and patched the ImageMagick exploit.
Not only that, our clients tell us that GoDaddy, when they are informed of their clients’ misfortune, try to talk them into buying a “security product” to make their websites more “secure”, essentially blaming the hack on the absence of security products installed on the website.
While we have the utmost respect for GoDaddy, we don’t think they’re doing the right thing here, one could see them as extorting money from their clients because of a server exploit that these clients cannot control.
So, what do we do when get a GoDaddy hosted hacked Joomla website?
We do the exact same thing that we do for other other hacked websites: we cleanup and secure the websites, except that at the end, we tell the client that they need to move their websites to a VPS (they can remain with GoDaddy, but they just need to move to a VPS).
We think that GoDaddy is making a mistake with their current perceived strategy of “make-the-client-pay-for-our-server-exploit”, but they are a gigantic company, and maybe they know something that we don’t, or maybe the whole thing is not intended, or maybe we are just plain wrong (and we hope so).
Whatever it is, we’re sure that GoDaddy clients are not finding it fun to get hacked. So, if you are a GoDaddy customer with a hacked Joomla website, please contact us and we’ll clean your website for you in no time and for a very affordable cost!