The domain I have had for the longest (and made the least money from) has had a range of life cycles. When I first purchased the domain, I was really excited. I spent a lot of time on it and had a good start. Right about when the site was getting going, “life” happened. I moved, bought a house, changed job locations, etc and my great domain and website sat dormant for a long while. When life finally settled back down (3 years later) I went back to the drawing board and decided to start cheap…like stealing-scripts-cheap. I found a nulled or pirated version of a very popular forum and went through all the necessary steps to install it and away I went. I am sure you have heard of a thing called karma or maybe getting what you deserve? Well, I was about to get a good lesson in it….

Things were going pretty well. I was starting to get forum posts, user registrations and a good steady stream of traffic. Questions and answers were posted to this “cheap” forum that was working great. However, about 2 months after I installed that nulled script, I got a funny email from my hosting provider:

Hello

This is to inform you that your account has been locked out because of vulnerable script found on your domain which allows one to relay unauthorized emails through our servers.

This makes our servers being black listed as this allows spamming from the server.

Please have a look at your scripts and take necessary steps to remove all such scripts

Regards,

Technical Support

Karma bites.

So I of course had to uninstall the script. Actually, what ended up happening is I had to delete my account completely and reinstall everything from scratch. The hacker compromised my password and was able to gain access to my server and install mail scripts that sent out spam. I even had to laugh at some point. Of course I went and purchased the official script from the developer (in fact, 3 of them). It has been over a year since I did that and I still haven’t even gotten close to the break even point for that BUT I sleep a lot better at night now.

Lesson:

Please whatever you do, know matter how tight your budget is, invest in the software or scripts that will power and run your site. Nothing will damage your credibility more with your users and readers than if they find out your using nulled scripts, stolen software or templates.