Subdomains hijacked? check your mail. and webmail. subdomains!

[Barysh]

I have been a happy hostgator customer for almost 4-5 years, no complaints, and almost no downtime in that time too!

I was kind of shocked to learn that on my reseller domain, and all other resold domains for my clients, hostgator has placed an adwords type shady search page on all mail.[domainname].com and webmail.[domainaname].com subdomains.

Sure, live help said its the mail server and you shouldn;t access it via http??? So if no one uses it, why did they feel it would be a good place to place a shady ad/search page that normally require great deals of traffic to turn a profit?

I wouldn;t really care , but the page actually pulls your domain name into the page as if you are hosting it, and recommending links at the bottom.

This is shady, and I can;t believe my beloved hostgator is doing this on paid hosting accounts without permission or knowledge of the domain owners????

Is there ad profit sharing to help pay for the hosting?

Live help simpy told me it can't be changed, so stop complaining... unlkess i get a dedicated account.

The worst part is in 4-5 years many clients don;t necessarily have huge traffic, or are very active, but in the first few years, hostgators webmail was accessed though mail.[domainname].com, so not surprisingly today a client using the original login info i gave them 3 years ago, went to their domain, and saw the shady ad/search page, and was ready to tear a strip off me, b/c they thought I was siphoning traffic off them.

I really suggest you all check your mail.[domainname].com links, and let hostgator know what you think of what they have posted there. why not just host a blank page for content? Seems shady to me, these are paid hosting accounts, not free ad revenue supported accounts.

[GatorJoshL]

Barysh,

I apologize that you are having a bad experience with HostGator. Let me first start off by saying that this is an easy change. If you email support@hostgator.com with your domains and explain what you did in this email, we can make it so where it goes to a default page of your own. We can accomplish this by adding a wildcard dns to your domains. So *.domain goes to your site.

Secondly, this is nothing new, we have been doing this for a while. All money that is earned from these search pages goes to charity, not that changes anything, but I thought you should know. You can read about our MAJOR donations on our blog at blog.hostgator.com.

Again, I apologize that you are just now noticing that we do this after being a customer for so long and assure you a simple email to our Administrators can take care of this.

We thank you for your business and look forward to getting this resolved for you.

Thank You,

Josh Loe
Systems Administrator Level 1