It’s a complete nightmare to be suspended by the hosting company. We’ve come across hundreds of website owners over the past decade who have been told by GoDaddy that their website has been removed because of the existence of malware. A frustrating and exhausting experience may be the method of reversing the suspension, but it does not need to be. We will walk you through the process of repairing your website and preventing the suspension of the domain.
TL;DR
You should instal our WordPress Malware Removal Plugin if you have malware and are only trying to clean up the infection and fix the web (MalCare). It’ll scrub the web immediately. So you’ll need to come back and read the remainder of the article to get the website unsuspended by the web server.
Why Did GoDaddy Suspend Your Site?
For all of the websites hosted on its servers, GoDaddy runs a daily search. It suspends the websites after discovering ransomware on a WordPress website and alerts the owners of the domain. The site’s suspension is a precautionary measure. Your site’s malware may end up using a lot of server resources. This will trigger the slowing down of other websites sharing your server. GoDaddy only needs to ensure that other websites hosted on the same hosting domain are not affected by your compromised domain. This is why your account was suspended by GoDaddy.
How to Fix GoDaddy Suspension?
The GoDaddy suspension email holds the secret to the website being patched. But we do understand if it appears to you that the letter is indecipherable and overwhelming. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly normal. We will clarify it all and guide you through the process of fixing your website and unsuspending your GoDaddy account.
We’ve got a copy of the suspension email sent by GoDaddy to WordPress domain founders. Look at the letter—
GoDaddy tells you about the existence of malware on your website in the email and they have submitted a list of malware that they find on your site. You’ll need to scrub your website to unsuspend your website and then tell the web host about it. We will teach you how you can delete malware from your hacked website in the next section.
Step 1: Remove Malware From Your Website
You can clean a website infected with malware in two ways, either manually or using a security plugin from WordPress.
Should malware be removed by you on your own?
Generally, we encourage readers, for good cause, to clean their website using a plugin. One would assume that it is easy to conduct malware removal on your own with the aid of the list of malware issued by your hosting providers. That isn’t the case, though.
First of all, you will have to access your WordPress files from your hosting account or through an FTP client to clean up your website. Generally, once you know what you are doing, website owners are cautioned against viewing such data. A tiny error may result in a broken website.
In addition, the list supplied by your web host is not a full malware list. And there might also be false positives in the list i.e. files labelled as malware but clean.
Therefore, a much-preferred way to clean up the compromised WordPress account is to use a security plugin. But when picking a WordPress protection plugin, one has to be patient. It’s no surprise with the amount of protection options out there so many people wind up with plugins that don’t entirely fulfil their needs.
Malware Removal with a Security Plugin
Only in areas where it is normally present can most protection plugins run a light search checking for malware. They also scan for only existing malware and therefore struggle to detect new malware that could infect your website. If you want a good security plugin that uses more complex technologies, so your best bet is MalCare.
- With MalCare, on your WordPress website, you should run a malware search and believe that it cannot detect some malware concealed, secret or otherwise on your website. The plugin runs a deep search to locate malware on your web, where it goes beyond the known range of locations. It keeps track of all the changes you make and reports unusual activity on your website.
- In addition, you can be assured with MalCare that no malware can survive the robust scanner. Not only does the protection plugin search for unknown viruses, it gathers and investigates codes that might say whether a code is malicious or not, checking for trends and actions. That’s how fresh and even difficult malware that other security plugins appear to ignore is discovered.
1. Simply instal and activate the protection plugin to search the website with MalCare. The plugin will immediately start checking your website, and once the process is complete, it will alert you to the malware detected on your website.
2. Cleaning your website by choosing Auto-Clean from the dashboard is the next step. Sit back and encourage MalCare to delete from your website any signs of malware.
It will take a few minutes to disinfect your website with the MalCare malware removal plugin.
You are hopefully ready to move forward and apply your site for review at this stage. Keep on though. And though it’s clean, once you find and patch the flaw that caused the hack to happen in the first place, your site can still be vulnerable to another hack. Bad certificates, obsolete plugins and themes, etc., may be We’ll show you how you can repair the vulnerability in the next part. The most popular WordPress security flaws can also be verified.
Step 2: Fixing the Vulnerability
You should take a few steps to patch the security vulnerability on your website that has helped hackers to access your website. Those are as follows:
1. Update your website
In the hundreds of thousands of compromised websites we have experienced over the past decade, 95% have been hacked because of an old plugin that is insecure. Updating WordPress can help boost performance, add new functionality and most notably, solve security problems. Vulnerabilities go unpatched when you miss patches and encourage hackers to enter your website. Therefore the next step in fixing the suspended website is to upgrade the installation of your WP core and all your plugins and themes.
2. Delete plugins and themes you don’t use
If you’re just like us and you enjoy testing out new gadgets, then on your website you’ll have hundreds of plugins and themes that are disabled. Vulnerable plugins and themes that are disabled are as dangerous as the working ones. You can try to keep them updated, but deleting them is much better and you do not have to think about them at all.
3. Remove pirated plugins and themes
The principle of free use of a premium plugin or themes is enticing, but it comes with a cost. Because they have secret backdoors installed, pirated plugins and themes are vulnerable. And it helps hackers to enter the WordPress website if you know something about backdoors. Delete it immediately if you are using some pirated themes or plugins. See our guide to how to check backdoors for WordPress.
4. Reset all the passwords
When hackers access your website, they will continue to make sure they will access your website later, long though your website has been cleaned up. They’ll try every technique in the book to do this and one tactic they always use is to build a new customer. You can continue to find a user that you can not remember or you can reset all the passwords simply. The hacker can’t log in to your website that way. You will reset the website’s passwords with only one click if you are a MalCare customer.
Once you have taken all these measures, you can proceed to submit your website to your host.
Step 3: Ask GoDaddy to Review and Unsuspend Your Site
Send an email to GoDaddy telling them that your website is malware-free when you are able. In the same forum, you will send a message in which they tell you that your website is suspended. If you could re-scan your website and take a screen shot of the results, that will be useful. As confirmation of the steps that you have taken to repair the website, append it to the email.
Step 4: Remove Google Blacklist (if applicable)
For suspended websites, it’s very popular to be blacklisted by search engines like Google. The search engine giant needs to have a stable browsing experience with its customers. It also blocks users from visiting websites compromised with malware. It is an effort to save people from being casualties, such as being diverted to other pages, of unsolicited practises. It’s interesting to remember that there is no way for users to disable the alert and visit your website. Check our tutorial on how to repair stolen redirects from WordPress.
You’d like to make sure your website is currently blacklisted by Google before we teach you how to delete the Google blacklist alert from your website. By checking out the following sentence on your tab, you can do a short site scan.
Location:yourdomainname.com
(Remember to substitute the name of your website for “yourdomainame.com”)
That means your website is blacklisted if you get 0 scores on Google.
An alternate way to review your website with these resources is penalised and banned by my website. You will continue to delete Google’s blacklist until you are confident that your domain is penalised.
Steps to remove Google blacklist:
- Delete malware from your website and we mentioned in a previous chapter how you can do it.
- First, you will need to let Google know that your website is safe. In order to apply the site for review, we have a Google blacklist guide that outlines the steps you need to take.
This takes us to the conclusion of how to repair Godaddy’s suspension.
We’d love to remind you that we’re doing a series of posts on site host account suspensions before we get to the end of the articles. You will want to take a look at suspending Bluehost and suspending the SiteGround account. Find out more on why your web host account is suspended, too.
Under Conclusion
It’s no joy to see your platform suspended, but it’s a lesson that will make a big difference to how you manage your websites. Getting a security plugin in place will help guarantee the potential safety of your website from hackers.