You open your email and find you have a suspension email from Bluehost that looks something like this:
Bluehost has suspended your account, what are your next steps?
First, determine the reason why Bluehost would suspend your account.
The most common reasons are:
- Non-Payment
- Spamming
- Malware
- Server overloading
Non-Payment
Easy enough, login to your Bluehost account. Click the account icon in the top right-hand corner, then choose Billing from the drop-down.
Enter new details in the Billing Information and Payment Method sections. Click the Update button. After you update your billing information your account should be back online in 15 minutes.
Spamming
Spamming intentionally or not is a serious offense. If you are collecting visitors and customer email information, it’s possible one of them has reported an email they received from you as SPAM.
If you are using email marketing in any way you need to be up to date on your email practices, including but not limited to DOUBLE-OPTIN email marketing for anyone not making a purchase but signing up for your newsletter.
Generally if you are sending transactional email, for example after an order was placed you email the customer the order details, shipping email etc, you are usually safe from spam complaints.
You should use a email solution such as mailchimp or sendgrid to send your email, this way they won’t be coming from your server and you can avoid many spam complaints.
Both Mailchimp and Sendgrid have excellent email marketing solutions for wordpress.
Mailchimp WordPress Plugin
Sendgrid WordPress Plugin
If the email from Bluehost references a Malware.txt file, you have malware on your account and is sending spam.
Malware
If your site is suspended due to malware, the email Bluehost sends will reference s Malware.txt file.
This file is located in your hosting account. If you are familiar with FTP and have an FTP account you may be able to find the malware.txt file.
In most cases, you will most likely not have your FTP logins handy, so you will need to login to your Bluehost account.
Click on File Manager, navigate to the /home/user directory and look for a file called malware.txt
This file contains the list of files which either have malware injected into them or are completely Malicious.
Right click the file and select open/edit. The file should open in your browser and you should see a list of files.
If there’s only a few files, you may be able to clean them up yourself and avoid having to pay a professional to do so.
If there’s tens, hundreds or thousands (yes we’ve seen infection of tens of thousands of files), you will need an automated means to remove, or restore your site from a backup after you delete all the files.
So from there you will have to go through the file list, edit or remove the files. Before removing any files, you need to know what you are doing.
You can quickly break your website if you simply start deleting the files that were marked as Malware.
Remember if the malware is embedded in the files that run the site you will need to take care in removing only the malware as to not break the website.
Check FTP Access
Another method your site could have been hacked in the first place is due to weak FTP accounts. It’s also possible your hosting account was compromised and FTP accounts added.
Be sure to check and disable any FTP accounts which may be enabled in your hosting account.
Once you are finished, simply reply to the ticket in your Bluehost account located under the Support tab. State you’ve removed the malware and request they re-scan and re-activate your account.