As we have found out more about the web security company SiteLock over time a lot of things that we previously heard and saw about them have come to make more sense.
One those things was we found out that is that when you get in touch with SiteLock you are likely dealing with a commissioned sales person. That seems to go a long way to explaining, for example, why when people who are already paying for SiteLock protection services get hacked that the response from SiteLock is to try to sell them additional services or even more expensive services similar to what they already have, as that person interest in selling them something, not in trying to resolve what went wrong with the protection SiteLock was supposed to be providing. That also leads to other issues, like dealing with someone that either doesn’t understand much about security, leading them to make rather ominous sounding claims, or saying things they know to be untrue to try to scare people in to spending more.
Something else we ran across recently seems to show how those commissioned sales people view potential customers, who in many cases have just had their websites hacked or access to their website blocked based on a claim that the website is hacked (which is not always true), which seems in line with what we mentioned in the previous paragraph. In a review of the company by a salesperson on Glassdoor they said this:
If you are willing to work weekends you will make a TON of money!
My commission checks in sales range from minimum $3500-$7300.
The only company where we’ll never be able to call all the leads if we tried. So many untouched leads because the market for our product is so large.
So people who are dealing with a stressful situation are simply leads to them.
Not surprisingly with how they sell people on their services they have a lot of customers that are canceling as mentioned in another review on Glassdoor:
Company has a high churn rate with regards to customers which directly impacted bonuses of their employees. (Myself included) There were 2(back-to-back) months where our inbound sales team did not receive our commissions despite passing our monthly goal as a team entirely.
That is even though they make it rather difficult to cancel their service and even though you are apparently dealing with sales people even when you try to cancel the service.
Avoiding SiteLock
If your web host is pushing you to use SiteLock due to a claim that your website is hacked then your best bet, from everything we have seen and heard, is to simply avoid using them, as the commissioned sales people are only tip of the iceberg with the bad experience many people come away with. While they do push SiteLock, if you ask the web host they will let you know that SiteLock is not required to do the cleanup.
Seeing as your web host likely gets a majority of what you pay to SiteLock (one major web hosting company that is run by SiteLock’s owners disclosed to investors that they receive 55% of the revenue from their partnership) despite not doing the work, you are necessarily going to overpay when going with SiteLock.
For the type of low quality cleanups that we have seen them providing you can find an equivalent service from many other providers for much less than they charge and we provide a high quality cleanup that often costs less than SiteLock charges (we will first check to make sure your website is hacked, so you are not paying for an unneeded cleanup).
A Better Alternative to SiteLock For Cleaning Up a Hacked Website
If your web host is pushing you to hire SiteLock to clean up a hacked website, we provide a better alternative, where we actually properly clean up the website.