SiteHost

Support Options

We are extremely proud of the support we provide to our customers. We measure our response times in minutes not hours, and our engineers respond to support enquiries. This means with SiteHost you get a fast response from someone who is extremely technical and can likely answer all of your questions on the spot. Few companies can offer support like that, and we’re confident we have the best support in New Zealand.

To keep our support running as smoothly as possible it’s helpful if our customers know how we work, and understand the best ways to interact with us:

General Support Enquiries

For a general enquiry or support request it’s always best to have a search on the Knowledge Base first. It’s possible that your question has already been answered and this will save everybody involved a bunch of time.

If you can’t find the answer to your question you can open a support ticket through our Control Panel - this is usually the best way to reach us. From here it will quickly get assigned to an engineer who can help you.

How To Open A Ticket Through Control Panel
  1. Login to the SiteHost Control Panel with the account facing an issue.
  2. Click the green mail icon in the top right to open the support page.
  3. Fill in the details under the Support Ticket heading.
  4. Click Open Ticket to send the details to us.

Although we do prefer tickets to come through our Control Panel, you can still email us directly at support@sitehost.co.nz.

Emergencies

It’s always hard to judge what is and is not an emergency, but if you feel like you’re having one give us a call on 0800 484 537. This will connect you with a member of our technical team 24/7/365. When you contact SiteHost for any reason regarding your account, we will require a phone support PIN that is generated to verify you over the phone.

Please be aware that if the issue is not caused by a problem with our systems call out fees will likely be charged.

Phone Support Pin

The phone support PIN is a temporary four digit number that we use to authenticate you over the phone whenever we need to take action on your account. This helps us prevent phishing attacks on your account and fraudulent calls impersonating you.

How the Support Pin Works

  1. Log in to the SiteHost Control Panel with the account you are calling about.
  2. Click the support icon in the top right (a green mail icon).
  3. In the Emergency section you will see a link called "support pin ( #### )". Inside the brackets will be your support pin which will help us identify you.

    The support pin expires after 5 minutes so it may change while you are on the page.

What Support Is & Is Not Free

If your support enquiry is just a question or is an issue related to one of our systems it’s likely that support will be free, but there are exceptions to that rule.

If you need us to complete a task for you which doesn’t fall under our normal responsibilities, or isn’t a fault caused by our systems (such as installing software for you, or doing back up restores) we will have to charge for our time. We need to do this to make our support sustainable and ensure our engineer’s valuable time is used wisely. If you think this may be an issue for you we can discuss ongoing support options such as Server Management depending on your hosting plan.

Major Outages & Network Updates

Should a major outage occur it’s best to follow us on Twitter (@sitehostnz). We will post regular updates there to keep our customers informed of what is happening. We also occasionlly post news updates, so it really is the best place to keep in the loop with what is going on at SiteHost.

You can also keep an eye on our Network Status.

Do You Have a Service Level Agreement (SLA)?

Across our Cloud Container, VPS, and VDS products we offer a standard 99.9% uptime guarantee. In any given month that your services fail to reach that uptime you can request an account credit (within 30 days of the downtime) on an hourly rate calculated from the monthly cost of that service.

We also provide comprehensive enterprise level SLAs that cover uptime, performance, support levels and more on a per project basis. You can read more about this on our Managed Services page, or contact us for more information.

Please note all credit requests will be considered but applied at our sole discretion based on our monitoring and other information we have available. Scheduled downtime or outages caused by factors out of our reasonable and direct control (such as external network issues or your application) are not covered by this guarantee or any SLA.

What is a Hosting Company responsible for?

Your Server and Hosting
Keeping our customers servers online and performing well is at the core of what we do, and your servers are no different. We take care of all hardware maintenance, network maintenance, monitoring our network, and looking after our virtualisation platform.

Your Website or Application
Support is important to us and we're available 24/7 if there are any issues with the environments we have provisioned.  Unfortunately, the amount of support we can offer for applications and packages that you have installed is limited.

Managed Hosting
If you'd like more coverage we also have ‘Managed Solutions’ available, which include doing server security updates for you and monitoring your website to ensure it’s online. We’ll even get up at 3AM to help get your website back online if it goes down. If you’re interested in the extra peace of mind a managed server will give you, simply get in touch and we can run some options by you.

Support Summary
SiteHost provides technical support to our customers via our Support Ticket system. The following are our guidelines when providing support: SiteHost provides support related to your SiteHost virtual server physically functioning. SiteHost does not offer technical support for application specific issues such as application configuration, programming, web or mail server configuration, or any other such issue. SiteHost does not provide technical support to your customers.