Hostgator Bites Spam
By Jonathan Bailey • Aug 21st, 2008 • Category: Articles, Personal Experiences
Last week I began tracking a series of spam blogs and some Twitter accounts for a planned story about how spam bloggers were using microblogging to push their sites out further.
However, toward the end of the week, something strange happened, many of the blogs went down, including some that had been up for well over a year. Not all had been using Twitter and they did not appear to be on the same network, yet they were closed.
The spam blogs seemingly had only one thing in common: They had been using Hostgator.
The Perfect Spam Host
In my experience, Hostgator has always been quick to act on both abuse reports and DMCA notices. Unfortunately, this has not discouraged spammers from signing up.
The problem is that, from a service point of view, Hostgator is exactly the type of hosting spammers would want. For eight dollars per month, Hostgator offers high bandwidth caps and unlimited domains. This is very appealing to spammers, who put out thousands of domains and subdomains that get very little traffic each.
This has made Hostgator very popular with Internet marketers of all stripes, both legitimate and spammy. Though the abuse team at Hostgator is quick to act when notified it has always felt that the spammers have had the upper hand.
However, in an email to me, a security administrator at Hostgator said:
“We’ve been more actively fighting email-based spam and web-based phishing/splogs for quite some time now. Especially splogs since they are becoming one of the most prominent ways of spamming these days, along with spammy comments left on blogs and trackbacks.”
Apparently these efforts are now paying off as I’m seeing more pages where Hostgator has suspended the site than spam blogs currently hosted on the service.
Moving On
The bad news in the situation is that, no sooner had I grabbed the screenshots of the “suspended” page than I discovered that some of the domains were pointing to new hosts.
Though only one or two of the sites are already back up, most just point to a default page, it is clear that the spammers are moving on and will likely have their sites back up within a few days or weeks.
While I don’t doubt these suspensions were a big deal for the spammers, it appears that they will recover and, while looking at the new hosts, they appear far less likely to cooperate in such matters than Hostgator.
Conclusions
There is a disturbing and frustrating trend among spammers in recent months. They have been seeking, and more regularly finding, safe harbor when it comes to hosting.
Though spam still thrives on some free blogging and free hosting services, much of it moved to domain hosts in recent years. However, spammers were not exactly welcomed with open arms there as well, many of the larger and cheaper domain hosts began to push back against the trend.
Spammers once again seem to be relocating. Though some are moving their sites into countries where reporting abuse will be next to impossible, most are staying within the United States still and are finding smaller hosts that are willing to look the other way.
The combination of less cooperative hosts and spammers getting smarter about copyright law is going to make it more and more difficult to get spam removed from the Web. If search engines don’t get more aggressive about punishing hosts that routinely provide shelter to spammers, this problem is only going to get worse.
Sadly, until spammers can’t profit any more from their activities, they’re going to continue both improving their craft and making things harder for those of us that want to put them out of business.
Though the presence of the Hostgator suspended page hampered my article a bit, it was still a welcome site. The service, despite reportedly acting quick against spammers, has earned a reputation as a spam haven due to the nature of its hosting.
It seems as if, just maybe, the Gator is biting back a bit and that could lead to a slightly cleaner Web for all of us.
Further Questions
What more can hosts do to battle spam?
Does an offer of unlimited domains encourage spammers?
Where do you think spammers will seek refuge?
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Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
Email this author | All posts by Jonathan Bailey
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Good for Hostgator! Any company that fights back against spam is doing the right thing, even if it's a pain. It amazes me how much spam is out there, with more coming all the time. It must be far more profitable than it seems. Thanks for your post!
It seems like Hostgator is doing its part in this area. Now we need to make sure Dreamhost, Midphase and others are also on board. Fortunately, in most cases, I think the big hosts are…
Glad you liked the post!
Yeah that was always one of the issues that has bothered me with HG. There's been numerous times that my server has been put on e-mail blacklists due to the spam other users send out. It's quite a mess to clean up - but at least it hasn't happened in a while.
Maybe one of these days when I get a few extra hundred bucks per month I'll just get a dedicated server and end the shared hosting torment.
I don't think you'd need to go all the way to dedicated, a VPS would give you a private IP, which is what I am on. I think that would work better for you. But yes, that can happen in any shared environment, as long as you share an IP with a bad guy, you can get bit by the blacklist.
Luckily, those blacklists aren't treated as highly as they once were, most spam filtering is content-based now…
In my experience, Hostgator bites quickly, but lets the spammer drop back into the swamp with little more than a tiny scar, free to spam again. Several times I've reported a prolific Craigslist spammer that posts hundreds of ads for some truly horrendous art from coast to coast. At first they were hosted with Yahoo along with Yahoo serving as their domain agent. Yahoo killed their site and it has remained a corpse since then. They got a new domain name and set up shop on Hostgator. After they dumped a couple hundred spamvertisements on Craigslist again, I reported them to Hostgator abuse. Hostgator suspended the site, but for only half a day. When I emailed abuse again that the hundreds of spam posts were still on Craigslist and I felt their “zreo-tolerance” policy was worthless considering the site was back up, they told me the spammer “explained” the situation and to report any future spam activity. A few weeks later, Craigslist is hit with another spam wave of this pathetic excuse for art. I sent links to Hostgator abuse and the site was suspended again, this time for only a few hours. Unfortunately, Hostgator has proven itself to me as being quite spammer friendly.
Ok, I have to say here that it is funny you posted this. I just had an experience with Hostgator that really soured my relationship with them. In my case it was a huge spam blog where they allowed the spammer to simply remove the infringing links in the DMCA notice and not shut down the operation.
It definitely seems they've made their peace with spam, much of this seems to have started AFTER their partnership with ThePlanet. I'm not sure why that is…
[...] better than subdirectories for search engine rankings? Saved by victorcuervo on Mon 22-12-2008 Hostgator Bites Spam Saved by womenshealth2113 on Mon 22-12-2008 Domains and Subdomains Saved by michellerafter on Thu [...]