Reseller / Hosting Question

Hi! This is likely to be a long one, sorry. I am interested in your services, but have a few questions because of a situation that just arose for me that has me totally baffled and upset.

I'm a web designer, not really a computer guru or anything, but my background is in graphic design and I fell into web design about 10 years ago. I host a small number of sites (about a dozen) for clients who use me as their web designer, and friends, family, and my church's web site. Not a huge client base, but it made more sense to set myself up as a reseller and charge a small fee for hosting sites as residual income.

Anyway, I have been with my current host for about six years now and have never had any problems until the other day. I noticed that all of my hosted sites, as well as my own, were down for an extended period of time, including our mail servers. In the end, they were down for over 13 hours. Major problem for me, as my second business is a web store selling office equipment, which does quite well (it would probably actually be my "first" business, as its where I make the money I live on!).

Contacted my host and after about three hours got a response that said they were looking into it. In the end they sent a message saying the following (some of which I don't even understand, as its not my lingo):

"One of your client domain which was having paypal FHISHING from our server violating TOS-AUP has been deleted. (They listed the site here) We have DC issue due to this. Please check it. All other sites are working fine."

What I take that to mean is the site in question, which was basically a "throw away site" I had created in WHM panel was PayPal FHISING. I didn't even have any emails account set up for this site. It was simply an area, which I haven't even accessed in several years now, that was used at the time for demoing web sites "in progress" for clients, before they went live. Like I said, I didn't even have any email accounts set up for it and I certainly don't have time to pull "FHISING" scams and risk losing my hosting services!

My concern is why would this happen and what if it had happened to one of my "real" clients sites and they had their accounts terminated? I host three small web stores, with lots of inventory, that would be devistated if this happened, including my own!

Not really knowing that much about this kind of stuff, I turned to several peers who are far more into the hosting game with me, and some have suggested that the domain could have been "hijacked" and used for sending SPAM due to loopholes in a CGI FormMail script or something of that sort? How does one protect theirselves from something like this. I know I get all kinds of SPAM and return mails for my real domain, that make it look like they have been sent by me, but I have nothing to do with this. If someone is using my account name to send SPAM, what am I supposed to do? The people I spoke to also suggested that my current host was "out of line" pulling the entire site and could have just disabled it and contacted me regarding the issue to resolve it. Well they never contacted me at all, I found out all of my sites weren't working when one of my clients called me that fateful day!

It's not that I care anything about that particular site, because there was really nothing listed in it (maybe some old demo sites, that have since been completed, but nothing else). But, what if it had been one of my "real" sites?

Sorry, this is so long. I was hoping to get your expertise in this area and also a feel for how you would handle a situation like this? I'm really scared now, as this is the first time anything like this has happened to me in six years.

Asked and answered by LIVE HELP. Thanks Joel!

[circpros]

I can speak from experience on this one. My FTP password was subverted and someone uploaded a phishing script, and here is what happened.

Hostgator disabled the site (not all of my sites), and notified me of the TOS breach. I contacted them to assure them I wasn't running such a script, and requested that I be given access to fix the problem. It was granted, and I was able to disable the script and get things back up in about 10 minutes. No loss of data, and minimal downtime.

Despite the regular rants on here (including an occasional one from me ), HG is a great host overall. WE take it for granted when we've been around for a while and start to expect excellent service. When there is even a minor problem we'd like to see handled differently, some go off about it. I've still got a minor problem with WHM that needs resolved (#JUV-72983-879)....... but in the end I'm still a lot happier 99% of the time than I have been anywhere else.

I think you'd have a much better experience too, my friend.

circpros, that is good info to know. I have already signed up with HG and so far it has been a pretty good experience. The few issues I've had they have answered me on pretty quickly. I'm having a problem with Auto Pilot (cant get the accounts to set up automatically in WHM), but I've got a tech over at AutoPilot themselves working with me, so hopefully that will be resolved soon. I'm sure I have everything set up correctly, just won't work right. Something on my end I'm sure.