In our interacting with lots of people looking for advice after being contacted by the web security company SiteLock, one of the problems we have now seen happen repeatedly is that in SiteLock’s quest to squeeze as much money out of people as possible, they are causing people to abandon hacked websites that could quickly and easily be fixed. This causes time and or money to be unnecessarily spent on a creating a new website, and for businesses that are generating business through their websites, unnecessary financial losses.
The business practice that leads up to this is summed up with part of a recent comment from someone that did abandon their website, as to what SiteLock told them about getting the existing website cleaned up:
if I gave them a hundred bucks a month there will clean it up and make sure it stays clean or a one time fee of 300 dollars but, not responsible if within 2 days it’s hacked again
The reality here is that if a proper one-time cleanup is done the website won’t be hacked again in 2 days. Of course, if SiteLock can get someone to believe otherwise they have a better chance of them purchasing an ongoing plan that would get them $1200 a year versus them only getting $300 from the person. The flipside of this is that it also causes people to abandon websites believing they are going to have to pay all that money to keep the existing website secure and that it makes more sense to just start over (which might not actually resolve the issue).
The other important thing to note about this is that while a website cleaned with proper one-time hack cleanup won’t get hacked again in 2 days, SiteLock doesn’t do proper cleanups for that $300. They skip two key components, which are getting the website secure as possible (mainly by getting the software up to date) and trying to determine how the website was hacked and resolving that. Their $100 a month plans don’t provide those things either as far as we are aware. By comparison for most cleanups we do we charge less than $300 for the cleanup (and we only do proper cleanups) and with other providers you can get a low quality cleanup like SiteLock provides for much less than $300.
As we noted before, SiteLock is actually aware that websites can get hacked again if those two parts of a proper cleanup are not done, but that hasn’t lead them to doing them.
What makes this even worse is that many web hosts and other entities like WordPress help to promote SiteLock, which leads to more websites being abandoned unnecessarily (as well as causing many other problems people face if they get involved with SiteLock).
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.