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Is your Godaddy hosted website suspended due to malware attack? Have you received a suspension notice that your GoDaddy hosting account is suspended? In this article, you will learn more about how to fix the GoDaddy site suspended issue, reasons why Godaddy suspends domain and how to unsuspend it easily.
Do you have following questions:
GoDaddy, like all web hosts, suspends websites for various reasons. However, the two main reasons we have seen are:
There are other reasons as well, such as policy violations, but they are less common.
The first step is to understand why GoDaddy suspended your site?
We will discuss the causes, the process to fix it, and prevention techniques to avoid this message in the future. So let’s start.
If You are you using Siteground hosting, Check Out – Siteground Account Suspended WordPress Site – How To Fix
Having to deal with GoDaddy site suspended message can be a frustrating experience but you are not alone.
It can be in form of :
A large number of sites every year get suspended by GoDaddy due to various reasons. When the users visit the website, a message like the one given below is displayed.
To confirm it further, you can check your email for any messages from GoDaddy which would further highlight the causes for your GoDaddy site’s suspended message.
GoDaddy, which is one of the biggest companies in the world providing website hosting, recently disclosed that an unauthorized attacker hacked into 28,000 godaddy hosting accounts on May 4, 2020
In case, GoDaddy has suspended your site for violating its policies. You should see an error on the page that says “this site has stepped out for a bit” or a suspended site warning message on your website that looks like this:
Important: GoDaddy usually sends an email stating the reason for the suspension to all suspended websites. You must have received an email on the same. If you can’t find the email, check your spam email folder.
Typical reasons for the suspension of GoDaddy site are:
Let’s see why GoDaddy suspended the site in the first place.
Is your payment for GoDaddy account up to date and still your site is suspended? Did you use the server resources within your share and still the same problem persists?
It is also one of the common reasons why the message hosting account is suspended. The malware attacks, for example, are increasingly widespread.
So if your hosting provider discovers malware or viruses on your website, they will certainly suspend it.
They regularly check for hacked wordpress site and suspend them immediately.
You have to ask yourself – why would they do this? A hacked website is your puzzle, not theirs!
There are several reasons:
Immediately scan your website using WP hacked Help to see if it is indeed Hacked or infected with malware.
You can also access your website via FTP and download a copy to scan it manually.
However, it is important to be aware that this is not effective. Some keywords like eval base64 decode are used to identify malware. But these keywords are found in both good code and malicious code. Removing good code can break your website and cause more headaches.
On the other hand, phishing attacks can also cause the suspension of a hosting account. In addition, and other search engines scan websites on a regular basis for detecting and banning phishing pages.
Well in such cases when everything seems to run smoothly, the malicious actor is often hidden behind the scenes. In the above-given cases, it is so common that your site has been hacked. Moreover, the hacked sites are often used for:
The worrying part is that you may be unaware of the malicious scripts running in the background as they are designed to be stealthy. However, the WP Hacked Help scanner detects such illicit activities and remove malware from wordpress site. You can also use it if there is no prior notification about GoDaddy site being suspended may be provided!
You might have recieved such email from godaddy which mentions –
The account is overreaching the allowable quota of resources.Mostly due to Entry Points and CPU usage.
It means that the account is running more simultaneous processes than allowed by your hosting plan. and these processes are demanding more processing power than the amount allocated to your account.When it happens, your website goes down and it creates cPanel faults. It has been happening constantly with your account. The account might be suspended in accordance with the Terms of Service, in case it keeps overreaching the limits.
Each website has a certain amount of resources such as processing power, storage, and memory. In a shared hosting environment, these resources are spread across multiple websites.
When one website ends up using more resources other websites on the same server are affected.
Your site is poorly optimized, you have stored illegal content. Your site has generated too many SQL queries slowing down the server and penalizing other users.
In some of these cases, shared hosting may not be suitable for your use and you may need to switch to dedicated hosting. Please contact our technical support so that we can offer you the most suitable solution for your needs.
When you use the shared hosting plan of GoDaddy, your site is allocated a specific amount of resources i.e. webspace, processing power, etc. At times, due to reasons known or unknown, your site may exceed the quota of resources. Much of the premium hosting services have no restrictions on the processing power that can be used. However, in rare circumstances, if the service provider determines that a website consumes too much CPU and interferes with other websites, GoDaddy may suspend your website.
GoDaddy sends an email notifying you about the excessive usage of resources and requesting you to upgrade.
This may be a tempting solution, and if you have the budget, you may consider it. However, upgrading to a bigger plan is a superficial solution, because it is important to first determine why your website is using excessive resources in the first place. Remember, this is a symptom of a problem.
The only way to know for sure is by using a wordpress security scanner to scan your website. After removing all resource-consuming scripts or plugins, you can safely start your website again.
Renewal of subscription fails for reasons like expired cards, insufficient funds, and fraud prevention.
A month before your subscription ends, your web host will send you a number of reminders via email.
One of the most common reasons a site is suspended is non-payment for web hosting.
Hosts try to avoid billing problems by emailing customers in advance or setting up automatic payments with customers’ credit/debit cards.
If you have changed your email address or have filters set on your email account, you may not have received the notification. Check your spam folder for messages from the hosting.
Also, if your credit or debit card has expired or you no longer use it, the billing will not be accepted.
To get your site working again:
Depending on your host, your site will get back online quickly.
If you tried to renew your subscription and it failed, you will receive an email notification to update the payment information.
Most of us never read policies because they are boring and hard to understand. But policies are very important.
Violation of GoDaddy policies will result in the suspension of your website.
If you have violated the policies of the web host, your account will be suspended. Your account may have been flagged for spam, a copyright violation, or some other policy.
Contact your web host. Ask for more details and get a better understanding of the policy and how you can resolve it.
The use of copyrighted media, illegal file storage, sale of prohibited drugs, downloading of pornographic content and harmful political content are the main causes of suspension.
GoDaddy has a ton of policies. Going through them is not an easy task and a frustrating experience.
Instead, if you get a website hosting suspension email from GoDaddy, talk to their customer support representative as soon as possible.
Compared to paid hosting services, free hosting services tend to have fewer server resources. However, even in paid services, a user’s ability to access server resources is limited.
As a result, if your website has any script or code that consumes an excessive amount of server resources, the service provider will notice it as a violation. Also, your website may be suspended while the hosting service conducts an investigation. You must wait until the investigation is complete or the error is corrected.
Web hosting plans have usage limits, you should check the limits of your plan.
There are several reasons why your site may be using more server resources:
If your website gets suspended, finding it offline can be synonymous with losses for your business. Here, we’ll list ways to fix it and prevent this from happening.
If your site goes down, finding it offline can be a loss for your business. Here, we’ll list ways to fix and prevent that from happening.
Good hosting companies are aware of this. They don’t suspend websites unless there are solid grounds for taking such action.
A good way to start fixing your site is to check the email that GoDaddy sent you. If you can’t find the email, call them to find out why they suspended your site. You also have the option of a live chat.
So, now that you understand why GoDaddy site was suspended, it’s time to figure out how to fix this mess.
To fix a hacked wordpress site you need to clean the malware infection. Ask your web host to whitelist your website and install the security plugin. It will scan your website immediately and inform you about the malware found on your website.
If you want more options, check out this list of the best WordPress security plugins.
Important: Generally, websites are hacked due to vulnerabilities. In most cases, this is an outdated plugin and/or theme or weak user credentials.
Before you call on GoDaddy to undo your website suspension, update all your plugins and themes, remove inactive and canceled plugins and themes, and fix weak credentials. Also, take some hardening measures to make sure that your website will never be hacked in the future.
Hosting servers have usage limits, especially if the website is on shared hosting. Sites experiencing traffic spikes or unoptimized systems can overload the server, which may be frozen, as occurs on a personal computer when it crashes.
When trying to access a website that is experiencing an overload, the browser will wait some time for a response from the server and will display an error page with the status “no response from the server”.
In some cases, GoDaddy may block the website for security in question to prevent other customers who are hosted on the same server from being harmed.
In this situation, an error page from GoDaddy will be displayed stating that the site is suspended.
There are two plausible scenarios in which you are spending server resources due to increased traffic:
A gradual increase means that your website is attracting more and more traffic every month. This is great news and it means your marketing efforts are working. You should see a traffic graph that looks like this:
All you have to do is upgrade to a higher plan.
But if there is a sudden spike, it’s worrying. Here’s what a sudden spike should look like:
If you see a sudden spike in traffic, try breaking down the traffic sources.
Were you running ads to drive traffic to your content? Are you organizing a giveaway? Has one of your articles gone viralgo viral?
These are all great results and in this case, you just need to upgrade your hosting plan.
But if none of those things have happened, it’s a giant red flag.
Your website is probably undergoing a DDoS attack. In this type of attack, hundreds of thousands of bots are sent to your website to overwhelm your server and bring down your website. Here is our guide on how to stop DDoS attacks.
However, if DDoS attacks aren’t the real issue, you can try looking at the Server Usage Report in GoDaddy dashboard.
Here is an article that shows you how to Protect WordPress against DDoS Attack.
If the server usage report is not clear or difficult to understand, then contact GoDaddy support team. Maybe it’s a plugin or theme using these extra resources.
If nothing works, you will need to hire a developer to debug this issue.
Payment issues are fairly common and shouldn’t take you long to fix them. Every website needs to be hosted on a webserver to be available on the internet.
GoDaddy, therefore, offers website hosting services, allowing any person or company to publish a website without having to deal with the configuration of the server itself.
As with GoDaddy domain, the website hosting service also needs to be paid up to date so that the website remains available on the internet.
Unlike domain registration, which is renewed in annual cycles, the website hosting service can be paid in different cycles, such as monthly, quarterly, semiannual, etc.
If for some reason the hosting renewal is not carried out within the period established by the provider, the service may be interrupted, which leaves the site down.
There are many reasons that can leave a site down due to lack of payment for hosting. Among the main ones, we can mention errors in credit card billing (expired, blocked, or over-limited card) and non-payment of the billing slip.
Once you know the exact policy you are violating, you can take steps to rectify the problem. In fact, you can ask GoDaddy’s customer service representatives to help you resolve policy violations.
Despite being a highly controlled environment and relying on the latest technology to ensure that everything is running smoothly. Hosting companies like GoDaddy can run into problems in their own data center.
At the most popular hosting companies this rarely happens, but when it does, thousands of websites are unavailable, and the site is suspended message displays. It can be fixed at Godaddy’s end.
A heavy site that takes a long time to load can be overloading the hosting server. In scenarios like this, a small increase in website visits could overload the server and take the website down.
Therefore, it is important to use best practices to keep the website and hosting optimized.
To find out the performance of your site, there are tools like Page Speed Insights, Website Speed Test, the Pingdom and more.
When you are ready, inform GoDaddy that you have fixed the issue.
You can find a GoDaddy representative by calling 1 (480) 463-8389. You can also get on a live chat.
All this is not mandatory but it’s good to implement because it demonstrates a sincere effort. That said, don’t overdo it. If your GoDaddy site is suspended due to payment failure, you don’t need to install a firewall or take hardening measures.
Please ensure that you are sending detailed information about all the steps you took to fix your website. Your website should be unsuspended within 72 hours max.
The secret to prevent GoDaddy site suspended messages like “this site has stepped out for a bit” in the future is simple – follow GoDaddy policies to the letter.
Don’t worry, there are many steps that’ll help you prevent your site from suspension.
Another common reason why websites are suspended is due to malware infection. Keeping a security plugin installed will ensure that your website is being protected 24×7.
Maintaining basic security hygiene like updating plugins and themes, proper user permissions, strong credentials are a must.
Security Scanner like WPHackedHelp is most suitable to test vulnerabilities using custom technology to check WordPress websites
To avoid payment failure, switch to automated upgrades. Remember, your account should be linked to an active credit card.
To anticipate possible problems with the excessive use of resources on your hosting, it is important to create a routine to monitor your website’s performance.
Visiting your hosting control panel frequently can already give you clues as to how resources are being used. Virtually all hosting companies offer some sort of indicator on their control panel.
GoDaddy keeps a backup of your website, but if your account has been suspended due to payment issues, they charge you a huge fee to restore your website.
We recommend using an alternative backup plugin like VaultPress (Jetpack Backup), BackupBuddy, BlogVault, BoldGrid Backup, etc. to quickly restore your website whenever needed.
We highly recommend that you invest in your website’s security aspects. If you use a CMS such as WordPress, use strong passwords and take other recommended wordpress security best practices.
In this article, we’ve seen the reasons why your site might get suspended by GoDaddy and the consequences of this situation. We also know some tools to check and monitor the “health” of your website.
This can save a lot of headaches, as problems are soon identified and tackled to avoid website suspension in the middle of a campaign to promote a new product.
Many of you had your GoDaddy website suspended because of a hack . Like GoDaddy, Google can also detect a malware infections on your website and throw up Google blacklisting warning message or Decpetive site ahead or This site may be hacked message.