I recently had a customer receive an envelope in the mail that seemed to be an invoice for one of their domains.
When they opened it up they found what appeared to be a bill for $65.00 from a company called Web Listings Inc., offering domain name submission to 20 established search engines, up to eight keyword/phrase listings, and a quarterly search engine position and ranking reports for 1 year.
As you can see in the images below, the intent here is to fool the reader into thinking that it is, in fact, an invoice that needs to be paid. Web Listings Inc. is sadly preying on unsuspecting domain owners in hopes they can get you to part with $65.00 of your hard earned money.
Web Listings Inc. states that they will submit your domain to 20 top search engines. Sorry to break it to you guys, there are only 3 top search engines! If you received one of these fake invoices, our advice is to just throw it in the trash! Their phony invoices are actually sign-up forms for a service that has absolutely no valid purpose for existing.
There has been numerous threads on this issue, with no solid resolution. I found a FREE component/plugin that will allow the PDF feature of Joomla to work, and has some great customization features.
The component is called PhocaPDF, and was created by Phoca you can view a demo here.
You hear a lot of bad things on the net about GoDaddy, but they do have the best hosting for the price. If you can maintain your own sites, and write bash scripts for backups, you’re golden with shared hosting for Linux.
Windows on the other hand.. no bueno. If you plan on hosting more than 1 domain on an “unlimited” account, beware of the virtual directories. If your site does NOT reside in the root folder (as secondary domains must), whatever directory name you choose to put your files into, will be in the url of that site. So if you have a site named site1.com, and you put all of the web documents into the /thisSiteIsNoGood folder, when a user clicks on your site’s Home Button, s/he will be taken to site1.com/thisSiteIsNoGood/Default.aspx.
There is a little bit of discussion on various forums, and some suggestions at a hack workaround, but nothing that works nicely.
This is no knock on GoDaddy though, I called iPower and their shared Windows Hosting is exactly the same.
Hacked: Hackers are getting creative. I recently acquired a new customer, they called because their website was hacked, and multiple vendors have been unsuccessful at fixing the damage.
So I got to work. I found that the .htaccess file in the ~ directory had url rewriting enabled, but only for referring traffic from search engines… pretty smart.
If the above makes absolutely no sense, then here’s what happened. A hacker put a file on my clients site that told the webserver to forward ANY traffic from a search engine to the hackers site (that is selling sypware so they can monetize this hack), BUT if the URL was entered into the browser directly, allow the normal site to show up.
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