For the past few days, I've received a decent amount of spam from the same machine and domain, hosted on Hostgator. Deciding that enough was enough and that I had a minute of my life to waste, I sent an email to abuse@hostgator with some details from my Akismet screen.
I wasn't really expecting much… till I received a reply from the Network Security and ISP Blacklist Administrator over there, telling me they had suspended the spammer's account. And indeed, the domain I complained about now redirects to suspended.hostgator.com. Take that, spammer. And thanks, Hostgator!
Edit: and another account suspended on Hostgator. Ahah. Hey, it even gives me an idea for a plugin :)
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Nice work! And if you do decide to come up with a plugin along these lines, I'd give it a try!
Since I host my websites on Hostgator I am soooo glad to hear that they nipped that spammer in the bud! How did you figure out it was a domain hosted on Hostgator? Whois?
Sandra » Yes, a simple whois is enough to know this information. There are also tools around, like http://whoishostingthis.com/
[…] the Hostgator suspended page hampered my article a bit, it was still a welcome site. The service, despite reportedly acting quick against spammers, has earned a reputation as a spam haven due to the nature of its […]
I'm wondering if you checked the spammer's site the next day. If you did, you would have probably found it back up. I've reported a prolific Craigslist spammer several times. At first they were hosted with Yahoo along with Yahoo serving as domain agent. Yahoo killed their site, "buyniceart.com", and it has remained a corpse since then. They got a new domain name, "nicemodernart", and set up shop on Hostgator. After they dumped a couple hundred "nicemodernart" spamvertisements on Craigslist again I reported them to Hostgator abuse. Hostgator took the site down, but for only half a day. When I emailed abuse again that the hundreds of spam posts were still on Craigslist and I felt their "zreo-tolerance" policy was worthless considering the site was back up, they told me the spammer "explained" the situation and to report any future spam activity. A few weeks later, Craigslist is hit with another spam wave of this pathetic excuse for art. I sent links to Hostgator abuse and the site was suspended again – this time for only a few hours. Hostgator has shown themselves to me as being quite spammer friendly. :-(