When it comes trying to find a company to help you deal with a hacked website, one of the big problems is that many people providing reviews and recommendations don’t actually have a good idea of what a proper hack cleanup service would entail. We have had people that come to us re-clean websites, who after we ask if the previous company had determined how the website was hacked, tell us that trying to do that never came up, but the company did a good job. The fact that the website needs to be re-cleaned seems like it might be an indication that they didn’t actually do a good job, but what tells us for sure that they didn’t do a good job is that they didn’t try to determine how the website was hacked despite that being one of three basic components of a proper cleanup. In our experience a lot of companies fail to attempt to do two of the three components of a proper cleanup (the other being securing the website, largely by updating the software), which makes it not all that surprising that we have a lot of people coming to us to re-clean websites.
With one company trying to find an accurate assessment is hard as they have flooded review sites with positive reviews of little value. That company being SiteLock, which otherwise has a rather bad reputation. That bad reputation is due to their business practices, which are even worse than the usual bad practices of the industry. Instead of trying to improve them, which might not be possible since without misleading and greatly overcharging people they likely wouldn’t be able to sustain their business due to the poor quality of their offerings, they have focused on pushing people to leave reviews right after having an interaction with them.
One review from last week that we ran across really stands out for that. The review was one of two five starts reviews left by this person in the same day.
The first one is rather vague:
certainly professional and extremely responsive to my problems….highly recommend!
The second one is more specific:
I have had to request three successive cleanings (all in one day) to hopefully resolve a malware problem – this particular malware was very persistent and difficult to eradicate. Each time I requested a repeat service, they did not hesitate or put me off – they worked the problem with professionalism, and for that I am very appreciative. Thank-you.
That they failed to clean things up fully at least twice (it is entirely possible the issue still hadn’t actually been resolved and even the review just says that it was “hopefully” resolved) seems like it should be a negative, but somehow that is treated as positive.
Maybe it says something about SiteLock’s targeted customer base that they are “appreciative” of someone doing what they were already paid to be doing.
The reality here is that from what seen of SiteLock, they don’t properly clean up websites, including skipping those two components of a proper cleanup, so the situation where the issue wasn’t resolved multiple times isn’t surprising. Cutting those corners wouldn’t be what we would describe as professional behavior.
Down the road the results can be worse, below is a review left on another review website, consumeraffairs.com, from just a few days ago, which is in line with we have heard repeatedly about SiteLock:
My website was hacked about 3 months ago. I signed up for Sitelock services as they promised me that they would clean my website from all malware and make sure that it wouldn’t be back. They explained to me that the hackers had found a back door and they were going to repair all the files and make sure that they wouldn’t find their way back in. They did clean my website and it was up and running well after about 48 hours. Their customer service reps and technical reps are very nice and sound very knowledgeable. Their service is not cheap at all but I thought that for $50 a month, I was now covered… 3 months later, I suddenly couldn’t log in onto my admin panel. My access was “forbidden”. I contacted them many times (as well as my website host) with no answers at all from Sitelock. No one contacted me back…
Considering that SiteLock’s idea of website security doesn’t involve actually securing websites, what happened there isn’t surprising.
Based on everything we have see the likely reason why this person was told they would need to pay more to remedy the situation is that when you get in touch with SiteLock you are usually dealing with a commissioned sales person, not a technical person, so they don’t have the capability to resolve an issue and their interest in getting you to spend money with them or in the case of existing customers, more money (we have seen that done up to level of trying to sell someone a cleanup for a website that wasn’t hacked).
What is also interesting about that situation is that there was a belief that the cost of the service was indication of the effectiveness as opposed to some actual evidence that the service was effective (which we haven’t seen SiteLock or providers of similar ever provide despite making incredible claims about the security their services are supposed to provide).
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.