Status Upgrades

We consider it important to closely monitor security & performance to ensure that our services continue to run as transparently as possible for our customers. This requires changes which are outlined below. This page explains any upgrades that have taken place recently and should be your first check if something appears to not be working as you expected.

10/08/10 & 17/08/10 - SiteHost Scheduled Maintenance

We have the following upcoming scheduled events which could affect all North Shore customers. Please read below for more information.

Our upstream provider has advised us of a network upgrade which may affect your services.

Please contact us immediately if this timing is inconvenient.

11/06/10 - Unscheduled Routing Issue

At approximately 13:35 hours on Friday the 11th of June, customers hosting in both Auckland City & North Shore locations of our network began seeing domestic routing issues. SiteHost engineers were immediately appraised of the issue & began investigating. Service was restored at 14:06 hours on Friday the 11th of June.

The cause was a domestic routing issue upstream from our North Shore location within our connectivity provider Orcon's network. In addition to Orcon customers being affected those who connect through Telecom or Telstra Clear may have also been affected if their connection went through Orcon's network.

International connectivity was not affected & continued to operate normally at both locations, and connectivity from APE & WIX to our Auckland City location was unaffected also.

The root cause as to why this outage had a ripple effect, was due to a misconfiguration in the way routes were learnt & re-advertised to domestic peers causing some customers to be routed through the Orcon network when other more preferred routes were available. As a result we have organized with the Orcon engineers to make some configuration changes which will correct this misconfiguration & prevent this type of fault from affecting our Auckland City location in the future.

In addition to this our phone system failed during the above fault, leaving customers unable to talk to us on the phone. We currently use a redundant VOIP solution for our phone systems with a server at each Auckland location to provide redundancy & this configuration has proven to be very reliable historically, even during network failures. The fact this system failed is deeply troubling to us & we will be implementing changes to ensure a more robust phone service in the future.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

SiteHost Support

07/09/09 - SiteHost Scheduled Maintenance

We have an upcoming scheduled event which will affect you. Please read below for more information.

The host machine your Virtual Private Server runs on requires a security upgrade. To complete this upgrade we will need to restart the host machine & thus your VPS.

In addition to the security upgrade we also need to physically move this host machine into another rack as part of our ongoing upgrades.

We do not expect this downtime to exceed 60 minutes per server.

Please contact us immediately if this timing is inconvenient.

18/08/09 - SiteHost Scheduled Maintenance

We have an upcoming scheduled event which will affect you. Please read below for more information.

The host machine your Virtual Private Server runs on requires a security upgrade. To complete this upgrade we will need to restart the host machine & thus your VPS.

We do not expect this downtime to exceed 10 minutes per server.

Please contact us immediately if this timing is inconvenient.

08/07/09 - Auckland City VPS SiteHost Scheduled Maintenance

We have an upcoming scheduled event which will affect you. Please read below for more information.

The host machine your Virtual Private Server runs on requires a security upgrade. To complete this upgrade we will need to restart the host machine & thus your VPS.

We do not expect this downtime to exceed 10 minutes per server.

Please contact us immediately if this timing is inconvenient.

16/06/09 - Unscheduled Network Outage

At approximately 13:23 hours on Sunday the 14th of June, customers hosting on a access switch within our Auckland City network began showing intermittent packet loss, ranging in intensity SiteHost on-call engineers were alerted to this immediately, and began taking corrective measures. We identified a customer, over utilizing the uplink ports on that switch causing the congestion then notified & blocked the affected IP address. This issue was resolved by 13:39.

At approximately 18:49 hours on Monday the 15th of June, customers hosting on the same access switch within our Auckland City network began once again showing intermittent packet loss. The intensity was more severe than the previous attack, an engineer arrived onsite at approximately 19:05 & began investigating the issue. A second time a customer was located, notified & blocked & normal service resumed at: 19:44

We will be reviewing & implementing any changes we can make to help mitigate this issue in the future.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

30/03/09 - Auckland City VPS SiteHost Scheduled Maintenance

We have an upcoming scheduled event which will affect you. Please read below for more information.

The host machine your Virtual Private Server runs on requires a security upgrade. To complete this upgrade we will need to restart the host machine & thus your VPS.

We do not expect this downtime to exceed 10 minutes per server.

Please contact us immediately if this timing is inconvenient.

02/03/09 - NZ VPS Plan Upgrades

It is not often you get given something that is truely free; this is especially true with hosting in New Zealand. Here at SiteHost, we're announcing that from today we have doubled the memory on all our New Zealand VPS plans!

We are not changing anything from the service we offered yesterday. It is the same latest Intel CPU based, Raid-10 VPS service you guys & gals have been raving about, we've just upsized it (but in the good, healthy 5 + a day kinda way).

Is there a catch? Well, there is just one minor detail we need to mention. If you are one of our most loyal VPS customers, you may have a VPS on our old network. If you do, we will need to migrate this VPS over to our new SiteHost network for you.

How can you tell? It is simple. If your VPS IP address does not start with 120.138.xxx.xxx you will need to move. Please contact our support staff at support@sitehost.co.nz to arrange a time & we'll take care of the rest for you.

The old plans

Plan Memory International Bandwidth Disk Space Price
Xen Lite 128MB 3GB 5.0GB $30 per month
Xen Pro 256MB 8GB 10.0GB $60 per month
Xen Extreme 512MB 10GB 15.0GB $95 per month
Xen Ultimate 1GB 20GB 30.0GB $165 per month

The new plans! :D

Plan RAM International BW Storage Monthly Price
Xen Lite 256MB 3GB 5.0GB NZD $30 per month SIGN UP
Xen Pro 512MB 8GB 10.0GB NZD $60 per month SIGN UP
Xen Extreme 1GB 10GB 15.0GB NZD $95 per month SIGN UP
Xen Ultimate 2GB 20GB 30.0GB NZD $165 per month SIGN UP
Xen 4GB 4GB 40GB 60.0GB NZD $320 per month SIGN UP

The US Dollar exchange rate is being really rough to Kiwis hosting overseas lately, so be sure to let your friends know that for March only we're offering them up to NZD $200 account credit to help cover the bandwidth costs of migrating their VPS hosted offshore onto our NZ VPS network! Simply sign up, and flick accounts@sitehost.co.nz an email with the IP address of your old VPS, and we'll add the account credit depending on which plan you've signed up for.

This is our first major upgrade for 2009, but we are going to be announcing a number of others very shortly, so stay tuned!

What does this mean for me?

The quota has been assigned to your account, and you are able to upgrade the memory on your VPS. Some hardware nodes are quite full, so it won't let you upgrade. Don't worry, just email us at support@sitehost.co.nz & we'll take care of moving you to another hardware node quickly with very little downtime.

If you're not on the SiteHost network, you will need to be migrated over manually. This involves changing your IP address, don't worry we have worked hard to reduce the downtime involved with this move, please contact support@sitehost.co.nz for more information.

If you have questions

If you would like to discuss these changes with someone, please email or call us to speak to a support staff member.

10/02/09 - Unscheduled Network Outage

At approximately 16:20 hours on Tuesday the 10th of February our upstream provider (ICONZ) suffered a critical failure on its core network. This was caused by a malfunction on 3 of their routers. This segmented their network, and resulted in a complete disconnection of all equipment telehoused in their Auckland City data center. Our Secondary facility in Northcote was unaffected & where possible some SiteHost services failed over automatically.

Connectivity was restored via international transit paths at 17:15, and domestic connectivity was restored at 17:45. ICONZ are currently dealing with hardware vendors to diagnose the fault, and are planning a software upgrade to their core routers.

As a result of this outage, our telephone systems did not fail-over perfectly & experienced a 15 minute outage.

SiteHost apologises for this outage, and are taking the following steps to improve our network resiliency and reduce the impact should these outages occur in the future:

In the last few months we have started using Twitter (www.twitter.com), and were able to use this to inform users there was an outage. We hope you will follow #sitehostnz & let us know your feedback.

SiteHost are a datacenter redundant hosting provider, if you require additional redundancy options for your hosted service, please feel free to get in touch with us & we will do our best to help you.

 

"From my first contact with SiteHost it was clear that this was to be where our site was hosted. They are extremely knowledgeable, reliable and affordable and have always provided a level of service far beyond anything I have ever experienced. I have not hesitated to recommend SiteHost to anyone as a web host that can be relied upon."

R. Williamson