Account Hacked, Sites Gone, Now what???

They must have earlier backups? Thats insane.

Go to https://archive.org/web/

Put in your URL's.

If the wayback machine took some snapshots, maybe you can download some layouts etc.

Let me know if you had some luck there.

actually, try this.

google yours sites like this "site:www.sitename.com"

then, when your pages come up, click on the little arrow on the right of the links and click "view cached copy"

It should show a previous version of your site that google indexed and copied.

Do it as quickly as you can because they do not last forever.
Hope this helps

Warrick - Recover Your Lost Website

Hostgator is the worst shared hosting when it comes to backups, I only used them for 1 domain out of hundreds...and that was lesson enough. Never again.

Truly sorry to hear that. I have heard many complaints about Hostgator's security. But isn't hostgator suppose to perform backup once a week? .

I don't know how Hostgator stays in business. I switched when they were sold to that new company. Find a company with decent customer service.

I hope you get your sites back.

Be very sure that you don't "switch" to the same company. Hostgator = EIG.
And EIG = Bluehost, Hostmonster, Fatcow, JustHost, and 50+ others. Avoid them all!

For a quality non-EIG host, consider Site5 or Arvixe.

View google cache to get some web pages reconstructed.
Hostgator should have a copy of your website. Ask them for the oldest backup copy.

Backup is a very important task.
Always have your own backups downloaded to your local disk, Backup at least once a month to avoid the big trouble.

What's up with all these Gator haters? "Every" company that has a large customer base will have many unhappy customers. If you move to another hosting company, it will not eliminate the possibility of being hacked, not being backed up, or getting crappy customer service when something goes wrong. Hardware is hardware, and stuff goes wrong, no matter what company name you put on it.

Every large company with shared hosting can make mistakes like that. It's really up to you as the site owner to do backups. That being said, there are other ways to get the work back, even if it's copy/pasting from cached/web archives. It might suck but that is a lot of work to lose!

So don't you have the stuff on your local computer? You had to upload it from somewhere. I have everything on my computer that is on my server.

I sympathize with you, however as said above, you need to take responsibility for backing up your own stuff. Try the Google cache thing. That may recover some of it.

Don't forget to improve your security before or as soon as you can after you restore your sites. I still have a few older sites on a hostgator account. You can see the last time they were backed up by logging in to your cPanel and looking about halfway down on the left side. It is usually within 7 days or less. If you work on your sites daily like some of us - creating a backup is the last task every day.

Thanks for all the suggestions~ I found some cached copies using google, but some had already been overwritten. I actually found 1 thumbnail of my homepage for one of the sites on statscrop.com. Are there any other indexing sites like this that may have images of homepages?

Takeaways~

1.) I know I am ultimately responsible for my sites. I also know that if you do this stuff long enough you are going to have issues like these come up.

2.) I assumed (incorrectly) that I had at least some minimal amount of protection with Hostgator in terms of a backup. They ultimately gave me some line about how this just happened at the exact "wrong time" where they had overwritten a previous backup and had not done the next one. But it's not like these sites are brand new. The fact that they didn't even have some type of really old backup of a site is what really makes me mad.

3.) This was the final straw with Hostgator for me. Their support is only good about 50% of the time anymore. Not having my own backups is definitely my fault. However, I'm still searching for a new hosting provider because Hostgator just drops the ball too much.

any hosting suggestions are welcomed....

Not even close to true.

HG has a well earned, bad reputation. I can show you emails where a HG customer service rep. flat out lied to me about PP policies in an attempt to rob me.

"Every" large company does not do that, or anything close to it.

My sympathies Vallejo,
In case you haven't already, don't forget to check the cached pages of Bing and Yahoo as well, they are much slower than Google and you may well find some of your content,

use the same search operator as for G... site:h**p://yoursite
But you must act very quickly before your domain gets another crawl.
hope you manage to recover your work

Lesson learned, always make backups!!!

This is so revealing. I have some WP sites on Hostgator. How do I do the backup pls?

And you trust them for your product? You don't take backup yourself? You should use dedicated server somewhere. PM me, if you need help with servers.

Are you sure Gator didnt backup your site?

The last time I mistakenly deleted some database I contacted them and they reinstalled it for a little fee which I can't remember.

Though it was return to the previous look and not the earliest.

You might want to look at the WayBackMachine and start afresh..

I guess you have learnt the hard way like me, always backup everything you do because you never can tell.

Really, I'm impressed how HG is still in bussiness. Their affiliate program sux. Their hosting sux. Their support... sux big time!

I switched them a long time ago.

Perhaps try asking them if they could backup your website for money, perhaps this is their goal, lol?

Next time use the software KeePass to manage and store your passwords. It will help you to have a very strong different passwords for every account you are using on the web. Also be careful what links you are opening, and don't accept any images from strangers, at least don't open them before you scan it in virustotal.com

WOW I can't believe hostgators are doing this.. they don't have previous backups??? crazy!

Most good lessons are learned the hard way. You and only you are ultimately responsible for your backups.

I'm very sorry to hear about your losses. That sucks. But now, rebuild, learn, apply the lessons, and grow.

OUCH! Never been a fan of Hostgator. You should sign up with Godaddy instead. Also, whenever you create a password try to make sure its one even you would find a bit difficult to remember. Even if you have to save the password in your notepad it would be very useful. The thing about hackers is that most of them know the usually dummy passwords that most people use and they also try different variations of the same dummy password. This is very important.

Yeah try the Way back time machine recomended by other members here in this post - and try the Google cache method - they are the only two options I know of working in a case like this (where there are no back ups at all?!).

+Thanks for the warriors who posted that advice.

Also, I joined here yesterday and there was a Warrior asking about promoting his line of work, which is hacking a security - maybe you should look at working with a guy like this in the future to ensure your sites and content are secure.

Another note OP, you mentioned that someone got into your account using a password?

This tells me that you are not choosing good passwords - and your not securing your sites properly.

When choosing a password use small letters, caps LETTERS, numb3rs AND punctuation if allowed - even my Warrior Forum password has a bunch of $'s mixed in with it.

If you need any additional advice or help with your security then drop me a PM - I'm no guru in the hacking feild but I'm quite clued up on the subject and up-to-date. I can certainly point you in the right direction.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful - just make sure you learn from your mistakes to prevent something like this happening again in the future.

Peace.

Edit:

Some quick and easy tips to help keep your security... and therefore business...

a) Make for yourself a strong password - using ALLtypesOF#!$$@kk-writing.
b) Make cold back ups of everything - a cold back up is a back up on a seperate machine which is not connected to the internet. (This way, if you are hacked or you get infected with a virus, your cold back up will be protected)
c) Read up about and stay aware of the latest security threats. - Blogs and forums on IT security are a good place to hang out to stay informed.
d) Make sure ALL you software, extensions, plug-in's are up-to-date. Hackers use bugs in the coding often to do their dirty work - staying up to date helps keep most of the bugs patched and closes up many security threats.


I hope my post was helpful

Peace.

This is really ridiculous that your hosting provider (Hostgator) did not take back ups. Just irresponsible hosting company. This will teach us all that never rely on your hosting provider and take your own backups weekly, do it daily if possible. By the way move to another web hosting provider which is not a EIG group. You can opt for Arivxe, Godaddy, Hostdime etc.

HostGator are a total waste of space. They've taken the view with two of my clients this week alone, not to bother. In other words its cheaper for them to lose a customer on a cheap yearly contract and get their disk space back when he gets fed up with waiting for them to do something, and wanders off.

The biggest problem with trying to unhack your website is that the infection or code-injection or whatever it is that is the root of the problem, may well not have come from your website in the first place. Hostgator are #1 public enemy for this.

And all cheap shared hosting providers now regularly take the least cost route and simply block you from access until you get fed up with their endless and pointless automatic emails, and just drift away.

Then they can wipe their hard disk and start again with a new piece of Internet real estate.

The secret is to get someone who knows how to protect your site for you and avoid the issue in the first place.

Sooner or later you will either learn how or find someone you can trust.

Terence.

No backups? Hostgator slackin'

You can get latest google cache of your website simply. Go to google nand type >> site:yourdomain.com . You can view cache and ask any programer he will able to create similar website in hours. Thanks

I use hostgator. No problems so far. All my passwords long and complicated. Hope you get sorted.

No backups? Then time to get busy and start creating more sites, move on from it.

Is there anything left of your sites at all? Sometimes - especially if you're using WordPress - the hacker will just compromise the theme or the database. These can usually be recovered from within Cpanel or WordPress dashboard.

If they were simple HTML sites, do you not still have them on your computer? Like others have mentioned, archive.org are your best bet if everything is lost.

Certainly find a better hosting company - one that does backups automatically!

I had a hostgator account hacked one time. And when I input my website address there was a black screen with red arabic writing saying I was hacked by the turkish hacker. Thank God he didnt delete everything though. I feel bad for you. Did you design the sites yourself? If not check with your designer or programmer and see if they have a copy.

Always remember to backup your sites, even when you switch hosting from hostgator to another company, no one can guarantee the same problem won't happen again. So, don't rely on those hosting companys. Backup your sites on regular basis is the safest way!

This is a very old thread....thread starter have reported this issue back in January...
However...This thread is live again and here I want to share my experience and wisdom as well...

First....Your site can be hacked...anytime...and it does not matter which hosting company you are using....
You can not stop bad elements in our society and in world....They will always be there...
The best think about these hackers are....they are lazy....creatures
If you just make your sites.....bit harder for them to crack....they are not going to invest their time and hard-work on your site and will certainly move further in search of a soft target.

The Only advice, i can give here is...you should at-least have some very common protocols of safety and security of your site's in place to avoid such incidences.

Like timely...Off-Site backups (Well it's number -1)

I believe that you should invest your time or money first on Safety and security of your sites than anything else like SEO and other content generation activity.

I have seen many have lost their investment on their sites...just because they have chosen to invest in some other aspects of their online business than to first make their own site's safe and secure.