Serious Problem affecting Hostgator Customers

[Linda]

I made the following post to the thread on the Santy worm because it is an additional problem affecting all our servers. No one from support responded, so I'm reposting it here in case it was missed from being buried in the other thread. I also emailed support over 12 hours ago and have yet to receive any kind of response from them. As this is a very serious problem probably affecting all Hostgator customers, I feel it needs a response.

The problem we are having may be worse than just our sites being up and
down and loading slowly.

I have been serving ads on my sites through the Digitalpoint Co-op Ad
Network for over a month now. Everyday, they send a spider to validate the sites to
make sure I am serving ads. Starting yesterday, their spider couldn't validate my
sites. I posted in the Digitalpoint forum about the problem, and was told
that my server was sending back a 302 redirect, so they couldn't spider the
site.

I just did a server header check at
http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/...rver-header.php

Here is what the servers to my sites send back:

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Content-Length: 0Location: /?4ec06e28

I have a lot of other sites on different hosts, and none had the problem.
Here is what the server headers of those sites look like.

HTTP/1.1 200 OKDate: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 20:32:23
GMTServer: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix)
FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_perl/1.29X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.4
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

In the last couple of days, a lot of people have posted on Digitalpoint
that they have also suddenly had validation problems, and they were also
told it was because their server was sending back a redirect. This morning
I realized it might be a Hostgator problem, so I asked in the forum if those
people were hosting at Hostgator, and they were. I've emailed support a few
hours ago, but so far don't have an answer and it hasn't been fixed.

My big concern is Google spidering those sites with that 302 redirect showing.
As we all know, Google hates 302 redirects, that it could be cause for
penalizing, or even banning, sites. So I'm very concerned about this situation
and the fact that it so far has not been fixed.

I'm wondering if the rest of you are also having this problem?
Thought I'd pass this along to alert you.

Linda

[hotdog]

I had a client say the had this message today

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Content-Length: 0 Location: /?cce0f940

I never got it and tried on two pc's, this is on the shared server.
Havent contacted support as of yet but am glad am not alone, but means I owe someone an apology - doh.

[Linda]

Hotdog,

You can check any domains you have with Hostgator by doing a quick header check at:
http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/t...ver-header.php

Just type in the domain and click enter. This 302 redirect header is still showing for all my hostgator domains this morning. I contacted support about this 24 hours ago and still have yet to hear anything. They have not even had the courtesy to acknowledge that there is a problem, or to let me know if they are working on it or not. Considering the seriousness of the problem, this is really maddening!

Linda

[Jme574]

I have used the service you listed above and checked every site i have hosted with hostgator. While each and every site came back with the same 302 redirect, i have manually check each and everyone in bothe I.E. 6.0 anf Mozilla Firefox on 3 different computers and have been able to access each one fine.

That is not to say there are not problems with your sites, it just leaves me wondering if (in my sites case) that the service used to find the info. might be having problems themselves and issuing misinformation.

I really hope you find the solution to your problem and feel your pain with the lack of response you have received from customer support. Please keep us informed.

[Linda]

Jme,


This is not a site access problem! Yes, we can all access our sites.

The problem is that spiders can't. They see that header with the 302 redirect in it. And Google really hates those. They've been known to penalize and ban sites that have it. So this is a really serious problem if you expect your site to get good search engine rankings and traffic in the future.

It's also a big problem if you use the Digitalpoint Co-op ad network, which many Hostgator members use. Because Digitalpoint can't spider the site, they have disabled them until they can. That means no links and ads going out to any site on the network. There are many people posting in the Digitalpoint forum about this problem and they all have Hostgator accounts.

So it would really be nice to hear something from Hostgator on when this problem will be fixed, since it can cause everyone big problems with their SE ratings, and other problems as well.

One of the reasons I signed up with Hostgator is that a few people had told me they gave quick customer support. I'm not seeing it!

Linda

[Jme574]

Ok that explains it alittle for me. I thought that your site was being redirected.
Does anyone know the cause of the problem or is that what you are still trying to find out? I haven't done anything new with any of my sites and prior to this i had never noticed any 302 in my cpanel awstats, but now after checking one of my sites has 52 of them and another site has 29 and 13 - 301 moved permanently errors, and these are just my personal sites that get next to no traffic and don't really show up in the searches.

(i just noticed i do have a large amount of 404 errors)

[hotdog]

Thanks for the link Linda, I got the 302 on my site as well, interesting though hostgator.com came back as 202 (no error).

I checked my other sites (on another host) and are all fine, is just hostgator with the problem

[jlgreer1]

I just performed a header check on my site and it responded properly, ie, apache, etc. No redirects.

My site is on Cadillac.
Maybe the problem has been fixed.

Jeff

[Linda]

Jeff,

It hasn't been fixed on any of my sites. And it is now 30 hours since I first contacted Hostgator about the problem, and have still not heard a peep out of them, not even an acknowledgement to my emails.

Linda

[daverj]

My sites on corvette are not showing that redirect header. Maybe it's just a specific server?

[GatorBrent]

This is the first I heard of this and I know what it is!!! We recently added network-based flood protection (Cisco® Guard Protection) that's offered by theplanet to the following servers :
67.18.52.95
67.18.54.176
67.18.54.31
67.19.156.98
69.93.8.194
70.84.100.194
70.84.231.2


This was supposed to be a good thing for everyone. It was meant to stop attacks against the servers which it does an amazing job at. We had no idea it would be blocking good traffic such as spiders, and because of this we will have to scrap the idea. We have contacted the datacenter to remove it off all servers ASAP and have informed them of this problem with their protection.

Linda I cannot thank you enough for pointing this out as well as other users who contributed to help us conclude what the problem was. I will update everyone when they have removed the affected servers off of protection.

[GatorBrent]

What bots can we confirm are affected?

[GatorBrent]

Has been removed and problem solved.

[Linda]

Thanks, Brent, I'm very relieved to have this problem finally dealt with. I've just checked all my sites, and they are now returning a normal header.

I guess it's a good thing I'm using the Digitalpoint network, or I probably would never have realized there was a problem with the headers at all. It was only when they couldn't validate any of my sites and told me they were getting a redirect that I investigated further.

Linda

[ferret77]

I would say the redirect screws up googlebot

one of sites that was redirected lost the description in google

so now the results pages only show the url

pretty much killed google traffic and cost me about $20-30 every day

hopefully the bot will return and add my description