How to make money for poor Web Hosting or why Host Gator sucks
Hi, guys
I would like to beg your pardon from the beginning - this post is pretty long and may be even boring for you if hosting issues are not something you are interested in, so feel free to save your time and stop reading. If however you are looking for the reliable and honest web hosting, you may learn a thing or two from my bad experience with Host Gator.
The discovery
One funny day we've discovered very strange behavior on one of our sites. If one navigates to any page on the site with HTTP/1.0 protocol without Host header, then instead of the original content gets
<head>
<style type="text/css">
* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
html { height:100%; }
body {text-align: left; width: 100%; height: 100%; font-size: 62.5%; font-family: Helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: #000; background: #fff; margin: 0; border: 0; padding: 0; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<iframe src="http://searchdiscovered.com/?pid=5POJ5651L&dn=" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0"></iframe>
</body>
Wow! 100% by 100% iframe with stranger's website in it? How come?!
I was sure I've discovered something my web hosting has to know! Urgent! As a good customer, I've researched the situation even more. As it was figured our almost all websites on the shared IP have the same problem! Well, http://searchdiscovered.com/ get's it's traffic. Sorry, our traffic!
See it yourself!
Use Host Gator? Check this out! Go to any program, browser or online web sniffer, make sure your request is HTTP/1.0 (without Host header) and set your domain as a destination URL and the searchdiscovered.com magic happens!
Help, I need somebody!
I've opened a support ticket and explained the situation in details. Imagine my surprise when I've got an answer :
"I'm not seeing any malicious activity or content on the domain, the searchdiscovered.com returned source when not passing a host header (i.e. not specifically requesting the actual domain) is normal, and is our default landing page for requests that do not request a specific web page."
Pardon me? Serving request to a site aaa.com with response in iframe 100% by 100% from bbb.com is "normal"???? It took me a couple of emails with support to prove that I do provide specific URL and what was the true nature of the host header.
Well, I decided to try the other way and emailed them other way of testing:
- Run from the consol telnet boss.tv 80 (or any other domain from this IP)
- Once connected to the specified domain boss.tv, execute telnet command GET /tli (or any other existing page on the domain in test)
- Review the result - is it what's expected?
(just a side note - boss.tv is not my site, it just sits on the same IP 74.54.206.82)
Guess what was the answer? Clear the DNS cache...
Conclusion - Host Gator just sucks!
I think it's not ethical to grab the customers traffic in the hidden IT trick. And you?
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