Did FatCow and SiteLock Arm-Twist Us Into Paying them 15K?

I’m not sure if FatCow arm-twisted us and forced us into an upsell or was it a genuine problem. Should I pay SiteLock Rs.15,000/- every year to keep my server clean or are there other options? Let me explain...

I’ve been away from the blog for 10 days now. It started with me being unable to write one day. I figured I’d get the post done the day after and then all would be back on schedule.

But there were other plans underfoot. The next day when I tried opening the blog dashboard I was told, it was down and that I should contact FatCow to find out why.

Initially i thought it was an outage that would resolve itself in a few hours but 5 hours later the situation was still the same.

Time for Che’s entry. Che check other blogs of friends that shared server space with my blog and they were all down. A FatCow ticket was raised.

The FatCow guys came back saying there were malicious files on the server and until it was all cleaned up they would not take anything back online.

Rewind 6 months. My blog went down 6months ago and FatCow said there was malicious code. They recommended SiteLock as a service to monitor and remove malicious code. I didn’t have much of a choice or rather I didn’t know enough about wordpress coding so we hired SiteLock at around Rs.5000/- a year.

Now 6 months later all blogs on the server went down and FatCow said my site is fine because of SiteLock but the other two sites have malware. They said the easiest way to get all sites back online was to get SiteLock subscription for the other two sites too.

Again, not knowing what else to do, we paid an additional Rs.10,000/- (approx.) and got SiteLock on the job for the other sites as well. Within 24 hours all blogs were back online.

In the situation it felt like we were against the wall, our arms twisted by a giant like FatCow - ‘Pay us or else…’. We were fighting what felt like a losing battle, not knowing if there was another way out. We gave in.

Did we do the right thing? Is it worth paying SiteLock Rs.15,000/- every year? (Along with server space, domain, etc. this makes blogging expensive).

What can I do about this? How can I avoid this in future?

 

P.S. – Thanks to all this my 30 Day Blogging Challenge got left incomplete again. :( .