Posted by softwarelabus on 08/08/06 18:19

easygoin wrote:
> softwarelabus@yahoo.com wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I wanted to warn all website owners that some evil web hosts like
> > vistapages will periodically place a robots.txt file on your site that
> > disallows all search engines. It happened to me.
> >
>
> Just as no one has mentioned this - I wouldn't assume its your ISP
> unless you have confirmation from them and sometimes hosts (being one
> myself) have set their servers up to add certain files / folders by
> default - usually an .htaccess file and this might be where it came from.
>
> But rather as default - change your FTP password to something secure
> using different cases and numbers, and also change any hosting passwords
> if you have a dedicated / reseller / managed etc server - just in case
> some malicious personage has decided to "secretly" sabotage your site
> as this would indeed be a very good way to do this... as most have
> backups (don't we) of our online sites ;).
>
> Just a thought - Dimitri


I wouldn't put it past vistapages given their horrible customer review
record. One day their system admin deleted all my perl scripts just to
see who was bombarding the server. Well, it wasn't my scripts, but he
didn't even bother to put my scripts back, lol.

Also I've told the SA many times about their security risks, but he
doesn't bother fixing them. Not that long ago my entire account was
wiped. He simply told me to make sure I periodically change my cPanel
password. Well, it turned out the hacker even deleted all _their_ site
back ups, so they couldn't restore my site. You can't just log into
cPanel and start deleting the entire server files because you don't
have access. It was obviously a site hack. Oh well. I guess we can
look back at such things and laugh.

Just beware of web hosts that promise huge amounts of bandwidth, like
100GB, for practically nothing, like $5/month. If web host want, and
they lack a little common compassion, they have countless methods of
getting rid of you and even destroying your traffic while blaming it
all on you, lol.

Paul

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