Website redirected when clicking on search results - will a VPS help?

[ecmedia]

1. I host seven websites with a company (on several shared servers since they were launched over a period of time rather than at the same time) that I have been fairly happy but lately I have noticed that from time to time, when a visitor clicks on a search result, instead of sending the visitor to the page she or he clicked on, they end up on another website (spammer's website that includes ads). I did a little digging and found that it is because when spammers are able to hack a server they can redirect traffic and they do not do it 100% of the time and thus it is difficult to catch it.

2. When I raised the issue with the hosting company, they gave me a run-around blaming me for having Wordpress installed and other open source softwares. Actually the problem exists even on domains that do not have Wordpress or other open source programs installed.

3. My technical knowledge is very limited but I am assuming that these servers may host other websites and they are the culprits.

4. Will having a VPS prevent me from sharing the server and give me a clean environment to host my websites?

[encyclo]

This sounds like either DNS hijacking a.k.a. DNS Cache Poisoning [webmasterworld.com] or hidden redirects in the site pages. Firstly, have you searched for any evidence that the server has been compromised? Are these redirects only happening for certain visitors (whose local machines might be compromised and their default DNS configuration altered)?

On a shared server with insufficient separation between user accounts, then one vulnerable WordPress install can compromise all the sites on the server. Are all your sites in one hosting account (sharing the same document root) or spread across different physical servers?

With a VPS, you have a greater degree of separation between you and other users of the physical server, but you still must ensure that all your scripts are kept up to date, and that all patches are applied to the server. It's not a panacea but it might help - only if you tighten your security procedures too.

It does sound as if your current host is being rather too blasé about the matter, so you may want to look elsewhere. If you do change server, you must ensure you are not moving a site containing compromised code from the old server to the new, otherwise you're no further forward. :)