expensive lesson (we all know we "should" do...)

Hey guys, little "observation" or "lesson" I learned yesterday:

I had all my sites in one hostgator account, thinking they're not competing with each other in terms of SEO, so Google won't mind.

Well, guess what, my ONE hostgator account got hacked and ALL sites screwed with some dodgy malware.

Not visible to the human visitor, the "thing" just installed tons of backlinks to other sites on my site.

Google didn't like that at all and de-indexed a bunch of my sites. Probably hasn't visited the other ones, so hopefully hostgator tech-support can fix it before the Google spider comes along again.

Anyway: lesson for me: I'm switching it over to Hostgator reseller hosting, and then I'm setting up one cpanel per site.

I still don't know which way exactly they got it, could've hacked the main cpanel account or of course the FTP-access. (which has exactly the same password as the cpanel access, you can't change it).

Tip #2: when you set up lots of domains in one hosting account, at least in hostgator, they're being really helpful and they create another FTP account for each addon-domain. Meaning: another way in, or another login where you have to change passwords regularly.
I've now deleted all of those FTP accounts, because I cannot delete the master account, so I might as well only worry about that one.

Finally, of course there's no way of knowing whether they got in by me somehow having my computer infected with some malware that logs keystrokes, so I had hostgator change the password for me and I'll now see if the nonsense stops.

Veit