Just ahead of the long holiday weekend Hostgator sent out an astonishing email asking customers to login and get a new password – by providing their old password.

The email looks almost 100% like a phishing email and it’s generated support calls and emails and forum posts galore. Hostgator must be buckling under the strain of all the questions they’re getting.

But the email is genuine!

Hostgator are forcing their customers to change to a password generated by their systems, to enhance security. Once you get the new password you can change it to anything you like. Anything, that is, apart from the old password, which may or may not be compromised.

The ‘Gator has told a tale of woe about how possible it is for ‘evil’ forces to get your details. But rest assured, that hasn’t happened yet – so they tell us. Many have questioned why Hostgator would act in what seems like such a hasty and drastic way, unless there were some serious threat on the horizon – or even worse a ‘break-in’ already.

Hostgator remain adamant that this is a preventative measure.

Let’s hope so.

But in the meantime it probably pays to think about the passwords you use. Do you regularly use 1 password across many of your online accounts? Do you understand how vulnerable you are if you do that?

I know how much trouble it is to have different passwords for everything. I have several hundred to contend with because I use a different one for every email, site, social site, membership site that I own/belong to. It’s a real hassle, but it beats having someone walk in and trash all of them because they got one password.

And please, for your own sake, don’t use the name of your dog as your password. And don’t use your name with a 1 at the end. If it’s easy for you to think up the password it’s just as easy for someone else to guess it.

Don’t ‘plan’ to ‘get around to it’, because you won’t. If you’re going to beef up your security, start doing it now. Because it doesn’t look like anyone else will.

No related posts.

It’s a script that increases the price after each sale so it’s useful for putting a little bit of time pressure on a potential customer. Especially when, as in this case, I’m offering a valuable bonus in its own right. Because it’s a valuable package I don’t want it to sit there forever so I’m limiting the sales.

So my hosting account Cpanel told me I don’t have enough disk space to work on the database.

Not right – I have plenty of disk space. There’s an issue with the hosting server.

I’ve spoken to my hosting company and they can’t do anything immediately. They’re a good company, so I expect they’ll have this fixed well inside 24 hours (very well inside), but it’s now put my plans on hold because I can’t set up the script.

Good job I hadn’t left it to the last minute. I think it’s always a good idea to build in a bit of downtime when you’re planning something. You never know when you might need it.

So I’ll switch to a product I’ll be launching next week and spend my time productively on that, instead.

It actually took my hosting company more than 24 hours to fix the problem. The first time round the live service agent had to pass on the details to the more technical support team and didn’t pass on all the information I had provided about the problem.

End result: they had to start asking me what the problem was all over, but this time by email. The service tech. who handled the issues also didn’t seem to understand, despite being told exactly what the issue was. He clearly didn’t read the information I had provided him, because he tried to replicate the problem by doing something totally different and told me I had plenty of space.  That was not the actual issue.

Anyway, it’s resolved itself now and I believe it was a temporary issue with the hosting company’s own machines, rather than my bit of space that I rent from them. Fortunately I’ve spread my various sites around different hosting companies so if a major problem occurred with any one of them I wouldn’t be wiped out.

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