Account Suspended by Host? Here’s How You Can Fix It

Most messages indicating that your account has been suspended by the host comes in the very familiar vague manner. All it does is ask you to contact your host with no further instructions on how to rectify the issue. The most probable reason is that you’ve been hacked or there’s some malicious content placed on the site, but the important details will be missing.

Suspension of the account doesn’t mean they have deleted your site, but merely made it offline. Any attempts to access the site will redirect you to another URL that gives a standard message on suspension. Web hosts have many reasons for suspending accounts including non-compliance with their rules and regulations or other security standards. Couple of general reasons include;

• Hacked website

Hackers manipulate hidden vulnerabilities and security risks in your website to inject malware and backdoors. These malware carry out specific functions like redirections, data theft or modification, web resources abuse, etc. Spammy keywords or other spam content may also be placed on the site to trick visitors into divulging their personal data. If you are facing malware issue with check this detailed WordPress Hack removal guide

This eventually leads to the suspension of your site because such hacking attempts don’t only affect the website’s and visitors’ security. Other websites linked through the same host are also vulnerable to the hack, and you’ll be using a huge amount of resources. There’s also the possibility that other components such as data centers, cloud providers etc, may complain of the presence of malware. If your website sends spam emails from the web host’s IP, there’s a good chance that the IP address will be blacklisted.

The easiest solution in such a scenario is to use a malware scanner and completely scan your website. Then, remove all questionable material with the help of the scanner. Of course, there are other ways to deal with the situation manually. Common hack symptoms are redirection, wordpress pharma or viagra hack

Malware flagged by Astra Security’s Malware Scanner

• Payments for availing services from the web host have failed

Pretty self-explanatory, this implies that your (automatic) payment has failed probably due to insufficient funds, expired details or fraud prevention. All you have to do is check your payment information and take the necessary steps to lift the account suspension.

• The website is taking up too many resources on the server

If you’re on a shared hosting, you are sharing the hosting space with hundreds of other websites, which means you can’t use beyond a specified quota of resources. Memory, storage, and speed are shared features for everyone on the server. This is the consequence of a shared hosting plan where there are limited resources and everyone has a specific cap.

If your web hosting provider has sent you an email reminding you of excessive use of resources, it can be a ploy to upgrade your plan. Or, it can be a genuine concern of sudden spikes or automated bots. It doesn’t hurt to verify the exact cause.

• Any other rule or regulation is violated

Some web host providers may have specific policies that need to be followed – and most times we skip the policies page. This might be based on the content published, such as copyright concerns, spam, unwanted emails, illegal material stored on the server, etc. Policy violation is another major cause for hosting account suspensions.

Removing the Host Suspension

Now that we’ve covered the many reasons that can lead to a possible hosting account suspension, let’s get to the resolution. To lift the suspension, you can try a couple of steps mentioned below:

1. Resolving the issue of malware

While not all that often, malware infection is still the most important reason for account suspension and should be carefully dealt with. Unless you use a trusted malware scanner/remover, a manual resolution carries some risks.

• Since the website becomes offline when suspended, the task becomes more difficult. First, you need to contact the host provider for temporary access or whitelisting so that you can get some time to figure out the issue. You can also log into the dashboard of the web host or use FTP access and get a copy of the files on the website.

• After gaining access, you can install a trusted security plugin and scan the site for malware, then resolve it.

• If not, and you choose to manually clean the site, it is understood that you may miss some infected files or folders. You may also end up deleting something that allows your site to function normally. If you insist, look out for recently modified files, run some commonly found malicious codes against your files, etc. Restore with the latest clean backup of your site and replace any themes and extensions placed afterwards.

1. Flaws in themes or extensions

Flaws in coding, misconfiguration, or other loopholes could cause security issues frequently. Any extensions, themes, or plugins, will require more resources to function or update, if they are updated at all. If you get 503 or 400 errors on your site, such faulty coding is probably a reason.

1. Excessive use of resources

If you get 504 errors on the site, you need to find out the resource usage via the web host. If this is a sudden increase, it may point to hacking attempts, brute force attacks, etc. Google Analytics is a great tool to understand traffic spikes and their reasons, the lack of which points to malware or automated bots scraping for data.

These are some of many steps that can be taken to resolve the issue of account suspension, since each case is unique for each site and web host provider. Make sure that you don’t just resolve the issue, but take other actions (like regular updates) for optimal security.

If you think you need more guidance, check us this extensive guide on Hosting Account Suspensions!