2016-10-04 19:25 GMT+02:00 Leonardo Boiko <[email protected]>: > The Google error message felt a bit too harsh for a webhosting client who > merely exceeded their allotted bandwidth. It made it sound like the > website was hosting something illegal. >
It's not impossible that the site was hacked a bit somewhere and used by a thirdparty to host illegal content, or some malwares causing it to generate a spike of bandwidth. Stopping the website temporarily is a safe measure before admins can explain what is causing this unexpected excess, and some cleanup operations are eventually performed and some additional security measures taken (Google itself cannot do that cleanup without an active action by the site maintainer). However I agree that the automatic message sent by Google used by the blocker was very harsh. Google can detect malwares running on hosted sites and could be more informative about the cause: - blocked because of a security issue (without explaining more to the public, could be a DDoS damaging the operations on other hosted websites, or hacked contents...). - blocked until the site admins solve technical problems. - blocked temporarily because of excess bandwidth (but no security issue detected), but not saying publicly if this is because of failed payments (this is private communication between the host provider and the web service). - blocked temporarily due to a technical problem on the hosting platform itself. - blocked indefinitely due to a legal constraint (such as a court order, the court order may force the publication of a legal notice on a static page). And it should provide a better way of contact for site admins, or for explaining what visitors can do (if there was a malware hosted on the site, what they should do themselves on their own devices).
