How My Website Got Hacked & Blacklisted | The Cost to Fix It

About this video

(Summary based on the Arabic caption track.) Dale L. Roberts recounts getting a HostGator email warning that suspicious content suggested his account had been hacked. He says he got hosting from HostGator in 2016 on its ‘baby package’ with unlimited hosting and had about nine sites on it, including Self Publishing with Dale and Dale Links, while neglecting the smaller sites. One small site was hacked, loaded with spyware/malware, and blacklisted by Google so it would not appear in search. HostGator offered to fix it for a $300 minimum, a figure he feared would rise into the thousands, and a Wordfence quote came to $300 plus $100 per additional site in the bundle — under $1,000, about $800 as he recalls. HostGator support deleted the infected site, he deleted useless small affiliate sites, and his assistant Ava, who already had backups, used Wordfence reports to find and remove a malicious file that was present but dormant on other sites. He moved his Live Streaming Tech site to separate hosting for under $100, about $60 for the first year as he recalls, and says the cleanup ultimately cost him about $300, excluding that separate hosting.

Key takeaways

• Putting many sites on one shared hosting plan lets one hacked small site threaten all the others on the plan
• HostGator quoted a $300 minimum to fix the hack, and Wordfence quoted $300 plus $100 per additional site, about $800 total as Roberts recalls
• Delete small sites you do not actually need rather than paying to clean and keep them
• His assistant Ava had backups made in advance and used Wordfence to locate and remove the malicious file
• Roberts advises checking sites at least once a week and backing up at least once a month

Episode details: published June 8, 2020 · 8:37 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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