When it comes to the security of your website, your web host plays an important part but too often they are failing do what they need to do to keep your website secure. One of things they should be doing is keeping software on the server up to date as that prevents your website from being exploited due to a known vulnerability in the software.
To make it easier to spot when web hosts are using outdated control panel software we released the Control Panel Version Check extension, available for Firefox and Chrome, back in December. Using it you can see that HostGator is using an outdated version of cPanel:
The version of cPanel they are running, 11.36, has only been unsupported for a week now so the situation isn’t nearly as bad as many of the hosts we highlight for running years out of date software. But what makes it worth highlighting is that on HostGator’s website they say that they provide the “Latest cPanel Control Panel”:
The latest version at this point is 11.42, which was released a couple of weeks ago. If you are going to tout that you are using the latest version of cPanel then it is really unacceptable to not even be using a supported version.
In addition to the outdated cPanel, HostGator is using a year out of date version of phpMyAdmin:
There have been a number of serious security vulnerabilities fixed in subsequent versions of phpMyAdmin.