GoDaddy, GoDaddy, you bastards, I’m through
Your daddy walks in wearin’
A Napoleon Bonaparte mask
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, do you have to ask?
- ON THE ROAD AGAIN
It was only a matter of time. It seems some hacker group wanted to take down my site. Probably a Chinese military faction, a bunch of Free Content Tree Hugging Hippies, or someone I whipped in some youth chess tournament. Naturally, I was prepared for this shit so ensured my site was running the latest everything, and was more secure than Fort Knox – safe from ground attacks or air assaults.
But, it turns out, not safe from burrowing from below. These sneaky hackers realised my site was rock solid, so they took out the whole of GoDaddy instead. My blog was injected with evil PHP script which redirected my legions of adoring fans to malware pages. Apologies to the thousands of other bloggers on GoDaddy who were innocent victims of this malicious, round-about attack on Jon On Tech.
Fortunately, GoDaddy accepted complete responsibility for the situation, and their tech support really understood the problem and helped people quickly and effectively. NOT. Actually, they continually blamed non-patched software and their tech support people wouldn’t know they were being penetrated until the poker came out of one of their eye sockets. I hate those guys.
I’ve done some temporary fix (which you can find here) that goes through all the files on your system and removes the evil PHP. However, it’s only temporary. Me, and thousands of others, are completely at the mercy of the script-kiddies that currently can do pretty much anything to the GoDaddy servers. I might already be part of a BotNet. It seems to be some Linux Shared Hosts problem that is affecting other hosting companies too. If one account on the host is compromised, all the accounts are toast. So the Jon on Tech ship is floating, but leaky. Not to mention as slow and flaky as always. So why do I still live on GoDaddy? Cause I haven’t had time to get the fuck off it yet. But I plan to.
Here is what my home page looked like while fixing the problem. I stole the image from Google. Seems other people have the same sentiments as I do.
Thanks to @roekens who alerted me to the problem. It’s probably only him and my mother that read my blog, and Mommy dearest wouldn’t know Malware from Tupperware. As usual, I started this post with a Bob Dylan lyric. But let me end with the last stanza from a poem by the great (if slightly unbalanced) Sylvia Plath which sums up my #GoDaddy feelings nicely right now:
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through
DADDY – SYLVIA PLATH
P.S. Please let me know if anything dodgy happens again, like you get redirected to some pr0n or anti-virus rubbish. However, don’t be alarmed if the site is slow or times out. That’s just GoDaddy’s usual service.
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Is the proprietor of the GoDaddy surnamed Brubeck? Reminds me of a same-monker shyster from similarly fucked-up universe of broken promises and end-user pain (The Rhythm Of Life:
“Daddy was the new sensation, got himself a congregation/Built up quite an operation down below/With the pie-eyed piper blowing, while the muscatel was flowing/All the cats were go, go, go-ing down below… Flip your wings and fly to Daddy, take a dive and swim to Daddy, hot the floor and crawl to Daddy.”
I guess it’s really all about the Violent Femmes (or Gnarls cover) though: I can tell by the way that you dis your man that it’s Gone Daddy Gone, Love Is Gone.
Good post Jon, sack these fuckers pronto and get the good ship JonOnTech into safer hands soon -
For a while there I thought Jon on Tech had taken an intriguing, albeit abrupt, change in editorial direction. I found myself refreshing every couple of minutes to see what new and titillating tidbits would be sent my way!
Did you prefer the temporary design and editorial direction?
My feelings were mixed overall. I very much appreciated the new and improved graphical elements, particularly the extensive use of high definition video. On the downside, the extensive use of popups was a bit of a concern and for purely aesthetic reasons I missed the Dylan quotes.
I’d like to request the same experience of graphical elements and high def video that Peter had please
Just realised that my blogroll link still goes to http://jonontech.wordpress.com/ – which has been remarkedly reliable – although I did think you’d gone a bit quiet since March 2009
Great article! Like the page you use to notify your readers about the GoDaddy issues. Could you post this information on nodaddy.com so that others can learn from your experience?
Update: I’m still on GoDaddy, still angry, but must admit that @GoDaddy have been really helpful on Twitter so have won back some brownie points. They told me about the “free upgrade” to their Grid Hosting, which means I no longer get fucked over when the tenant I used to live on got busy for reasons beyond my control. Things have improved a lot since then.
I hate them as well. When Time Warner and Comcast changed markets in Texas I went in and changed ALL of my domain names to use a new email address. I used their bulk edit feature thinking everything was golden. I register quite a few domain names. So when GoDaddy gave the option to set your DNS servers while registering the domain name I was totally stoked. Well after registering 30 or so domains NOT ONCE has this feature worked. I finally was fed up and moved to InternetBS.NET. No coupon code and still under $8.00 even after the fee increase! Well OF COURSE the bulk update I did three or four years ago didn’t take. So ALL OF MY DOMAINS had an email address that is no longer in existence. They never mention that if you JUST CHANGE THE ADMIN EMAIL then they will NOT LOCK YOUR DOMAIN FOR 60 DAYS. Well needless to say I have already lost over 15 domains because I refuse to pay them another penny. Never again. I lost my kids first domain names. Guess where they go. GoDaddy gets to auction them off! Yes, so GoDaddy FTW! They are setup to win in every situation. GET OUT NOW!