DreamHost banned me for what?

I just received an email from DH saying that I have been banned for using 'site scrapers'? First off, what the hell is a 'site scraper' secondly, since I have not used anything but the 'one click installs' on DH, how in hell does one of my sites have a 'site scraper' - lastly, I have not even touched my account for over a year - why now???

This doesn't make any sense to me & am considering seeking legal counsel - they sent me a canned email telling me that I have been banned & not even referencing WHICH Of my sites were in violation -

If someone could clarify this to me, please let me know!

IAmAtMyWitsEnd aka promoCodeSLAYER

One (ore more) of your sites may have been compromised. Try googling for "site scrapers" or "black hat seo."

-Scott

In reply to:

I just received an email from DH saying that I have been banned for using 'site scrapers'? First off, what the hell is a 'site scraper' secondly, since I have not used anything but the 'one click installs' on DH, how in hell does one of my sites have a 'site scraper' - lastly, I have not even touched my account for over a year - why now??? ...

Unless that last year included keeping all of the scripts up to date, I'd guess there's your problem.

Check out all of your .htaccess files, look for new odd files, etc...

Someone could keyword stuff your page (likely with scraped material), but only show it to user-agents like Google. They could also be redirecting certain traffic based on whether or not it's being referred from search engines.

Depending how it's done, more than one site could be affected, especially if they're all under the same user.

In any case, a host can boot you at any time and they all have a TOS that protects them. The only thing a lawyer could do is take some of your money. wink

I'm also pretty sure that once DH receives a legal threat, they just cut you off & ignore you, so that definitely wouldn't be the best route for getting more info out of them.

I'd also guess at this point, you'll need to deal with abuse instead of support, so the replies aren't likely to be super-speedy as it would be a lower priority.

Yeah, Abuse would be the ones to talk to about this.

http://dreamhost.com/contact.cgi

How To Install PHP.INI / ionCube on DreamHost

DreamHost banned me for what?