Beware of Malware and Virus Scam with Website Hosting Companies

What is the Issue:
Posting this with the hope to prevent people from becoming victims of the website hosting scams that are flaring more and more.
It is really unpleasant, after many hours and days you spent developing your searcher or company site, you have to start from the beginning.
This is big a criminal scheme, backed by PE money, and hopefully some lawyers will manage to close the companies. They have been already fined by the SEC for different reasons, but obviously still operating. Until then, please stay away from Bluehost, Hostgator, Domain.com and 100 more companies they own (initially under the EIG name)

Scam mechanics:
1. You sign up for a multi-year service at very attractive rates. 2. Your site is affected with malware and you lose access to it. 3. They give you the runaround with technical support and give you a list of about 8000 files that have been infected (in my case this was in the ".htaccess" files). Then they offer you their partner services (Sitelock) to clean up your infected files and provide security in the future at much higher rates. 4. Another version of the scam, is that many people get hit with huge price increases when it is time to renew. Even after you cancel all services with the companies, they continue to charge your credit card.

Where to host your site: This is really difficult because most of the hosting companies have predatory pricing plans. As mentioned before, more than a 100 hosting companies are owned by the same holding with bad infrastructure (proven in independent research that has lack security and known flaws such as misconfiguration of cross-origin-resource-sharing). The general review sites (like G2, TrustPilot, etc) are not helpful, because even though there are thousands of people complaining of the scam, there are also plenty of paid positive reviews.

The Advice: In the entire internet, there seem to be only a couple of companies that are legit. To avoid marketing, I won't post them, but it is easy to find them, once you know that most are scam. I urge you to speak to a real person that you trust and that person backs his advise with his name, and that person has done hosting in the last 6 months.

I wish I knew that before and hopefully Searchfunder can put that somewhere in the advice/ tips for beginners. Willing to help with this or provide more details.


References:
https://researchasahobby.com/full-list-eig-hosting-companies-brands/
https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/fr5ib9/bluehost_sitelock_scam/
https://websitesforgood.com/beware-of-malware-scams-sitelock-hostgator-and-an-angry-web-girl/
https://www.hermesthemes.com/scam-alert-how-hostgator-attempted-to-extort-200-out-of-me-for-sitelock/