HostGator Modifies ALL .htaccess on account suspension

[sneggiwt]

I am very, very upset right now.

My account was suspended because I forgot to pay for the month. This has happened before, and I've had no issues before.

This month, however, after the accounts came back online... ALL of my 404 pages were redirecting to a hostgator 404 page that advertises their products.

I went to check the .htaccess to see what was going on... and it was empty. I then checked some others in subfolders... empty.

Every single one of my .htaccess files is empty... which means that I have ton of stuff that is not working on my sites right now because my tweaks to the .htaccess are gone.

I now have to spend a ton of time piecing them all back together.

You guys need to stop doing this IMMEDIATELY. I don't know who decided it was a good idea to overwrite all .htaccess files so you could advertise while the site was suspended.

This is especially frustrating because I need to access my wordpress admin section for obvious reasons, but without the correct .htaccess it's not possible.

[Chimpie]

Do you have copies of your htaccess files in your regular backups?

[EarlyOut]

Originally Posted by sneggiwt

My account was suspended because I forgot to pay for the month. This has happened before....

Sorry, but in my opinion, you have surrendered your right to complain about anything they do to your account. Someone who repeatedly fails to pay should be thankful they don't simply delete everything.

Besides that, backing up your .htaccess files would take you less than a minute in your FTP client program. It's not as if they're huge files that take forever to download.

[sneggiwt]

Originally Posted by EarlyOut

Sorry, but in my opinion, you have surrendered your right to complain about anything they do to your account. Someone who repeatedly fails to pay should be thankful they don't simply delete everything.

Besides that, backing up your .htaccess files would take you less than a minute in your FTP client program. It's not as if they're huge files that take forever to download.

Are you kidding me? Someone is a hostgator fanboy.

Manually replacing what is probably at least 100 different files manually would a long time and be an extreme pain in the ass. No other host I've used has ever done this... mainly because it makes ABSOLUTELY no sense.

And, right on cue, hostgator is apparently avoiding this...

[Madforce]

I understand where you are coming from, however....

Did you by chance open a ticket regarding the issue after you re-instated your account?
Did you find out if what occurred was a normal part of the process or perhaps occurred in error?
Did you try to see if those files could be restored prior to venting here?

I would suspect that it shouldn't have occurred, and as you have stated has not occurred in the past when your account has been reinstated. I don't know, but I would speculate that there may possibly have been an error in the process that may have been correctable if a followup was done with HG Support.

Regardless, I don't think coming on the forum and bashing them for something that happened as a result of your own oversight is warranted. Granted, there could have been an error in the process, but it was created by your own oversight.

I'd be kicking myself for allowing the site to get suspended in the first place, while unfortunate it didn't come back perfectly, I would still be holding myself responsible for being in that situation.

[EarlyOut]

Originally Posted by sneggiwt

Someone is a hostgator fanboy.

Not a fanboy. If you read more of my posts, you would know better. When HG is wrong about something, I'm not shy about saying so.

I just get really, really tired of people who screw things up in multiple ways, then blame someone else for their problems.

You have repeatedly failed to pay for the service. That makes you a deadbeat.

You have failed to back up your own files. That makes you foolish.

[Pitrow]

I personally agree with EarlyOut. You screwed up, you have to deal with the unpleasant consequences. Sorry.

There seems to be a major trend lately of people shirking responsibility for their own actions and trying to blame everything on others. I guess I'm just old school and know what personal accountability means.

[HalbrookTech]

The only thing EO is "right" about is that backups should exist on the OP's system. If HG is going to, by practice, make a change like that to a suspended account, then just terminate the account on late pay. Changing files, and allowing the client to re-access thier account is poor business practices.

[GatorJacob]

This should not have happened, I do apologize for the problems.

Do you have a ticket number that I can look into? cPanel's suspension script does not overwrite .htaccess files, they move them to .htaccess.suspend, and create a new htaccess with the suspension rewrites.

Please let me know a ticket number, and I'll get these fixed for you.