What to Do When SiteGround Suspends Your Site?

SiteGround

Is your SiteGround web hosting account suspended? It’s got to be a complete nightmare. Your web host provider’s suspension letter must be incomprehensible and intimidating to you. That’s entirely understandable. But don’t worry, we’ll clarify it and guide you through the steps of repairing the website and resuming it.

TL;DR

If your site has been infected with malware and you just want to clean it up and patch it, you can use our WordPress Malware Removal Plugin (MalCare). It will immediately disinfect the website. However, you’ll need to read the remainder of the article to get your website un-suspended by the webserver.

Why Was Your SiteGround Account Suspended?

Your question is answered in the SiteGround suspension email.

Simply placed, SiteGround does a security audit on all WordPress pages it hosts. When it detects ransomware on a website as a result of a breach, it takes down the site. Malware on your web consumes a lot of domain power, slowing down your site and all other sites on the same server. Furthermore, both sites would be vulnerable to infection. That is the primary explanation for SiteGround’s suspension of your website. It’s a matter of protection. You can use this guide if your website has been suspended by another web server.

About the fact that SiteGround provides hosting protection, it does not provide malware removal services. Instead, it is up to the domain operators to keep their pages safe. We’ll walk you through the cleanup process in the next segment.

How to Fix SiteGround Suspension?

To get your website back up after your hosting company has suspended it, follow these three steps:

  • Remove malware from your website
  • Remove Google blacklisting (if required)
  • Submit a site review to SiteGround to remove the suspension

We’ll go into each of these metrics in-depth:

Step 1: Remove Malware From Your Website

Malware can be removed in two ways. You can do it manually or with the help of a WordPress protection plugin. The manual approach is inefficient and dangerous. To manually clean a website, you must first locate and remove malicious codes.

This is more complex than it seems, and people with no technological experience always delete the incorrect codes, resulting in more disasters such as the website crashing.

If you want to try manual cleanup, go to our guide on how to patch hacked WordPress pages and scroll down to the section on manually scanning and cleaning a hacked website. Continue reading if you want to use a protection plugin.

Removing Malware With a Plugin

The amount of security plugins available on the market today is inexhaustible, but one must pick wisely. Protection plugins don’t all work in the same way.

In most cases, they do only a cursory search and never uncover secret malware that damages WordPress websites. Most protection plugins search for ransomware that has already been identified. Something that is brand new will be lost. When purchasing a protection plugin, it’s important to have these factors in mind.

You should also think about how quickly a protection plugin can be installed. It usually lasts anywhere from 24 hours to a few days, which is not ideal. And the longer it takes to scrub a website, the more likely it is to lose search engine ranking, traffic, clients, and sales.

A decent security plugin that conducts deep scanning and detects new malware isn’t hard to come by.

  • MalCare provides deep malware scanning, which examines all code for malicious patterns and actions.
  • It goes beyond searching for existing passwords to find new malware that other plugins sometimes overlook.
  • While some can take hours or even days to clean up the web, MalCare will do it for you with just a click of a button. In a few minutes, the website will be spotless.

Removing Malware With MalCare

Step 1: Install and enable the MalCare WordPress protection plugin to search and clean your website. It’ll start searching the website right away, looking for any malware that has infected it.

Step 2: Pick MalCare’s Auto-Clean alternative to clean the website in the next step. The plugin will scrub your website for a few minutes.

We’ve now resolved the big problem that caused your website to be suspended. Moving forward, we’ll quickly go into how to get your site off the Google blacklist, but if your site isn’t blacklisted, you can skip to the next portion.

Step 2: Remove Google Blacklist (if applicable)

Malware-infected websites are often suspended by their hosts and blacklisted by Google at the same time. Google, like your hosting company, will flag your website for security issues. It protects Google users from visiting compromised sites and from being subjected to unwanted behaviours such as being diverted to other sites. Check out our WordPress hacked redirect guide for more details. We recommend that you run a website security search to see if your site is hackable.

Note: If you’re not sure if your blog has been blacklisted by Google but want to find out, try using one of these tools: Is My Website Penalized or Is Banned. Insert the website’s URL, and the tool will tell you if it’s contaminated.

To get off Google’s blacklist, follow these steps:

  • Clean up your website as described in the previous segment.
  • Notify Google that your site is now free of malware. We have a step-by-step guide on how to delete Google blacklist alert that you might find useful when submitting a website for Google Review.

As previously said, the suspension may have been triggered by malware infection. If that’s the case, your Adwords account could have been suspended as well. Check your Adwords account, and if it’s been suspended, follow this guide to get it back up and running: Google AdWords Account Suspended.

Step 3: Ask SiteGround to Review Your Unsuspend Site

When you’re finished, send an email to SiteGround hosting telling them that your website has been cleaned. Instead of submitting a fresh email, we recommend responding to the same email thread in which they told you that your site has been suspended. That way, you won’t have to justify anything.

We recommend rescanning the web with MalCare’s WordPress malware scanner and taking a screenshot of the clean results. I’ve attached it to your email as evidence. It takes SiteGround 24 hours to search and unsuspend the website.

How to Prevent Being Suspended in the Future?

We hinted earlier in the article that account suspensions are the result of hosting services discovering ransomware on your compromised website. And if the ransomware was deleted, there’s no assurance that your website won’t be compromised again. If your hosting account is suspended again, you can restore it using the same measures. However, treatment is still preferable to remedy. It’s not as difficult as you would believe. What you have to do is follow a few simple security precautions:

Keep Your Website Updated

We’re both aware of how inconvenient alerts can be, and we’re all guilty of missing them. That, though, is a big blunder. We’ve dealt with hundreds of thousands of compromised websites over the last decade, with 95 percent of them being the result of vulnerable plugins or themes. It’s possible that keeping your website up to date would save you from being hacked.

Implement Stronger Username & Password

We sometimes lack strong passwords, resulting in the use of a weak username and password. However, this makes a hacker’s work even easier. All know how to get to a WordPress website’s login tab. If a hacker tried to get into the website, all he needed was the username and password. An intruder would have no trouble guessing your passwords and breaking into your website if your username is admin and your password is p@ssw0rd. Check out our tutorial on how to secure your WordPress login page.

Use a Security Plugin

Scanning, washing, and safety are the three main functions of security plugins. If you add a protection plugin to your website, it will be scanned and secured on a regular basis. It also lowers the chances of being compromised. Though there are several security plugins available, not all of them work in the same way. We’ve put together a comparison of the best WordPress protection plugins, which you can look at and see if they vary.

Last Thoughts

Suspension of your hosting account can be a disaster! As a result, we sincerely hope you find the guide to be useful. We realize this has been a lengthy tutorial, but before we wrap things up, here’s something we suggest you do:

  • Install MalCare, a WordPress security plugin, to search and secure the website at all times. It also includes a WordPress Malware Removal tool that aids in the removal of malware from your website.
  • Installing a WordPress Backup Plugin to take a full backup of your website is also recommended.
    Finally, implement effective site hardening steps to keep the website secure from future hacking attempts.
  • Maintain the security of your website, and if you have any questions, please contact us via the chat button on the right.