DISCLAIMER: We are not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with GoDaddy. We respect what they do for millions of businesses world wide and are  just offering our opinion on how to help better protect businesses out there that currently use them.

Top 5 Common GoDaddy issues we see:

1. Email Send & Receive Errors?
2. Your Emails Marked as Spam?
3. Inbox Full of Junk Mail?
4. Website Not Showing in Google?
5. Website Spammed or Hacked?

Email Send & Receive Errors?

Godaddy, uses one centralized mail system to run all of their clients email (secureserver.net).

There are technical pros and cons to this setup, but in the end, they are big target for spammers and hackers. That is why it pretty normal to see periodic outages or slowdowns to their email service as they are dealing with all of their client’s mail though this single choke point.

Nobody can beat Godaddy’s price point for what they offer for entry-level websites, and that is why it is typically the choice for so many small businesses just starting out to build a website and setup business email.

But once an business grows to more than 5 employees, the outages start to cost your business money as employees wait around during outages to send or receive emails.

Vital Help Desk sets up private mail services with either your domain. For example, mail.yourcompany.com or Google Suite email which allows you to use Gmail’s interface to send your domain’s email. Security and reliability are our #1 concerns as we believe all small businesses should be protected from hackers and spammers.

If you like to learn more on how we can help, just send a message to Kris in the chat box below for a free, no-obligation analysis.

Your Emails Marked as Spam?

When spam and viruses emails started to explode over the past years, ISP started to clamp down on the formats of incoming emails. On all newer business class setups, email authentications called “DKIM” & “SPF” identify your email server as legitimate.

They act like a fingerprint on the email envelope, to allow the receiving server to go back and check is this email real or fake. The biggest volume of spam was actually stealing someone @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com email and using that in the From box to send spam. Spammers would send them from any server since they would just spoof the from address.

When ISPs clamped down and required the DKIM & SPF records to be in place on all email servers, it immediately resulted in some older Godaddy clients emails to be marked as spam since they were not correctly setup.

You could call their tech support and have it applied for free. Godaddy’s admin doesn’t make this change very easy to make, but here is an article to step you through adding a SPF record to your Godaddy domain.

Godaddy has various hosting plans. If you have a cPanel admin panel, you can find the DKIM & SPF settings under Email>Authentication. But if you have different plan, you may need to call their technical support to get it applied.

Vital Help Desk sets up all our companies with the highest standards to make sure they stay on the most secure and reliable services. If you don’t want to wait on Godaddy hold, we can help you.

If you like to learn more on how we can help, just send a message to Kris in the chat box below for a free, no-obligation analysis.

Inbox Full of Junk Mail?

There are 3 popular ways spammers hit you:

1. Your email was published on your or another website in clear text. You can try Googling your email address to see if it shows up some where online.  If you can find your email in a Google search, chances are a spam bot collected it.
2. Your website contact form, may be being targeted by spammers and sending you junk in an effort to probe your contact form. Older contact forms copied the submission to the email used in the from line and spammers would use this to send junk mail with your site to what ever email they entered in the from line.
3. Your email was used to sign up for a not-as-ethical website that may have resold your email to other marketers. We recommend using a free personal email from GMail, Hotmail, or Yahoo to sign up for marketing material or making purchases online and only use your business email to pure business emails. You can always update your profiles to list your business email on email lists you trust to come to your inbox.

Godaddy only offers minimum spam protection on its cheaper email accounts. Businesses don’t realize how much time is wasted with spam when it starts to get bad. But what is worse is where there is lots of spam, there are typically more viruses and phishing attacks that could put your company at real risk.

Ransomware attacks will hold computers hostage till a ransom is paid in untraceable bitcoins. Hackers stealing your bank logins can easily transfer money to themselves. We have also seen companies being targeted for their UPS or USPS logins so thieves can send packages with their account.

Cyber thieves and hackers are constantly improving their tactics and Godday is  slow on shutting down these attacks as they have a mix of clients across various plans.

Vital Help Desk believes every business deserves basic protections to their website and emails, and we are constantly striving to be one step ahead of hackers by keeping our servers constantly up-to-date with security patches and ahead of all the best security practices.

If you like to learn more on how we can help, just send a message to Kris in the chat box below for a free, no-obligation analysis.

Website Not Showing in Google?

Godaddy’s Website builder is super simple for the novice to get a website online in a few minutes. It was designed to make things easy and the designs to be appealing. But the resulting websites are not well liked with search engines.

Innocent mistakes are typically also made when laying out website with their website builder that typically will just make the site invisible to search engines.

If you want a quality business website, we suggest using the WordPress platform which is installed typically for free by Godaddy, but a little more complicated to setup than the the website builder.

WordPress is designed to be “search engine friendly” and using what designers refer to as “Web 2.0” which allow the website to easily distribute your content across the internet. Your website showing up in these content sharing sites, immediately lift your ranking with search engines higher than the stand alone Website builder sites.

However, WordPress needs to be secured and constantly monitored to make sure it does not get hacked or initiated with spam.

Vital Help Desk believes every business deserves protections to their website and emails, and we are constantly striving to be one step ahead of hackers by keeping our servers constantly up-to-date with security patches and ahead of all the best security practices. Our managed WordPress services constantly monitor and protect your WordPress website.

If you like to learn more on how we can help, just send a message to Kris in the chat box below for a free, no-obligation analysis.

Website Spammed or Hacked?

There are typically 3 ways hackers take advantage of your email & website:

1. The most innocent is leaving behind a “Hacked by…” page but this means the hacker has a way to post content to your website. They could be funneling traffic to your website to attempt phishing attacks or installing virus on visitors computer by offering fake Flash Player installers.
2. Unfortunately, older versions of Outlook are prone to getting the user’s email password stolen. We have also have seen malicious public WiFI hot-spots featured at airports or tourist destinations world wide. Basically, hacker offer these free WiFi connection to scan your web traffic for clear text logins to a range of websites. Most of our devices are set to check for new email every few moments, so they can easily see a clear text password being sent to download your email. They will then take over your email to start send spam to all your contacts as you. In some cases they will ask for money transfers or pass virus to your contacts thinking you are sending them an attachment.
3. The most troubling hack is when they steal access to your website host and start uploading files to run on your website. Most often they take advantage of our website to send spam to hundreds of thousands of victims. This all points back to your website and could get your website suspended and It can also cause your normal emails to be rejected because “domain has been blacklisted”. If you suspect your website has been blacklisted, you can check a scan site like MXToolbox.com

There are a few ways to make sure you are protected:

• Make sure you have an SSL certificate installed on your website and email server. This will encrypt the connecting when you sign on to your email or admin accounts and hide your credentials from hackers. All Vital Help Desk hosting packages include a free SSL certificate and we instruct all of clients to only use SSL connections when setting up their emails.
• Servers and software like WordPress should be constantly up-t0-date.  Hackers are constantly finding new ways to take advantage of vulnerabilities. Making sure your systems are kept up-to-date is the only way to stay ahead of the hackers. Vital Help Desk has both fully managed and constantly monitored servers and WordPress installs for all our websites.  This makes sure the latest security updates are applied as quickly as possible.
• Make sure you have multiple layers of security. We first suggest your web & email server run a premium firewall that will automatically block suspicious traffic like too many bad password attempts. Second, if you run WordPress, we suggest you install WordFence since it offers a free WordPress firewall and will email you periodically of things to watch for on your site. Third, if your website is more than 3 years old and has never been updated, it might be time to move to a new host computer with the most up-t0-date operating system and a redesign or refresh to make sure our forms and website are protected from hackers.

Vital Help Desk believes every business deserves protections to their website and emails, and we are constantly striving to be one step ahead of hackers by keeping our servers constantly up-to-date with security patches and ahead of all the best security practices.

Our managed WordPress services constantly monitor and protect your WordPress website. We keep all of our clients on the most up-to-date operating systems by routinely updating our servers. In the rare event your website is compromised, we respond immediately when our monitoring alerts us to the suspicious activity. We can also revert your website to an earlier back up and close the hole the hacker used on your website.

If you like to learn more on how we can help, just send a message to Kris in the chat box below for a free, no-obligation analysis.

DiSCLAIMER: We are not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with GoDaddy. We respect what they do for millions of businesses world wide and are  just offering our opinion on how to help better protect businesses out there that currently use them.