Can you blame your hosting provider for a hacked website?

Usually not. Although it is the first thing you think when you see the ‘dangerous site’ notice on your website. It comes to your mind things like ‘my hosting provider is unsafe‘ or ‘does my hosting provider have something to do with my hacked website?‘. However, as usual, it depends on the case. In fact on most infected sites, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or Prestashop, it is not your hosting provider’s fault.

Reasons why your site is infected with malware

We will explain to you a way to find out if the source of the hack or infection may has something to do with your provider.

Among the many reasons of a malware infection on your site are:

• Outdated plugins, themes or CMS: Vulnerabilities of this type are among the simplest ways to infect your web. Usually the updates are the client’s thing, in this case you.
• The laptop or computer from which you administer your website is infected. Again, it is the responsibility of the user or webmaster to monitor that their terminals are secure.
• Someone has hacked any of your passwords: it is imperative that your passwords are secure enough and that you change them periodically.
• Your neighbor has been hacked (aka the site you share server with in your shared hosting)

Among the reasons mentioned only in the latter case you can say that your infection has something to do with your hosting provider. But, how to know it?

How to know if your hosting provider has something to do with your hacked website

When you discover a hack or malware infection the first thing you must do is to clean it completely. Either because you have an alert on your website or because you periodically analyze the malware,. The second thing is to make sure that it does not happen again, therefore, to find the focus of the malware infection.

Let’s focus on the last reason, the only one that may have something to do with your hosting provider. If the infection comes from the website with which you share a server, your provider may not have made sure to isolate the websites within each of your shared hosting servers.

How can you check that your server has some insecurity problem?

Imagine you do not find the reason for your infection. And you are totally sure about your security maintenance. You can check if any or all of the websites on your same host have the same problem.

If you have a shared hosting you can do a reverse DNS lookup to find out how many ‘neighbors’ you have and who they are. The service of Viewdns will give you that info. Once you know which site are on your same server, check their status and if they have infection or hack evidences.

Remember that you still have to confirm with your hosting provider the problem. He himself will put measures so that it does not happen again. And as we said before, the odds almost always point to the side of the webmaster.