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.
01/09/11 - NZ VPS Plan Upgrades
We'd like to thank you for choosing SiteHost. We acknowledge the trust you place in us as your hosting provider, and we are constantly thrilled with the feedback we receive from not just our direct customers, but all those in the industry who appreciate and acknowledge the work we are doing here.
Many of you will know that we highly value our very loyal clients, and so we are excited that we are once again able to offer you all another easy and free resource upgrade for your VPS server. In dealing with a large number of VPS's, we have noticed an increase in memory demands from modern web applications running on our platform, so taking advantage of these memory upgrades should result in better performance for you and your customers, at no extra cost.
The old VPS plans
| Plan | Memory | International BW | Disk Space | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xen Lite | 384MB | 10GB | 5GB | NZD $30 per month |
| Xen Pro | 768MB | 25GB | 10GB | NZD $60 per month |
| Xen Extreme | 1.5GB | 50GB | 15GB | NZD $95 per month |
| Xen Ultimate | 3GB | 70GB | 30GB | NZD $165 per month |
| Xen 6GB | 6GB | 100GB | 60GB | NZD $320 per month |
| Xen 12GB | 12GB | 200GB | 120GB | NZD $620 per month |
The new VPS plans!
| Plan | Memory | International BW | Disk Space | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xen Lite | 768MB | 10GB | 5GB | NZD $30 per month |
| Xen Pro | 1.5GB | 25GB | 10GB | NZD $60 per month |
| Xen Extreme | 3GB | 50GB | 15GB | NZD $95 per month |
| Xen Ultimate | 6GB | 70GB | 30GB | NZD $165 per month |
| Xen 12GB | 12GB | 100GB | 60GB | NZD $320 per month |
| Xen 24GB | 24GB | 200GB | 120GB | NZD $620 per month |
Cloud Hosting Launched!
Also today, we are launching what we believe is a replacement for the dated and less secure shared hosting product of yesterday. We are calling this Cloud Hosting.
Unlike traditional shared environments, with our Cloud Hosting your websites sit on their own dedicated virtual server which is fully managed by our team of experts. This means better performance, uptime and security for your website. Under our Cloud Hosting plans you do not pay per website, but based on the resources you require, and unlike shared hosting SSH access to your website files is standard allowing for easier website deployments and greater control.
For some time now we have offered both HA (Highly Available) and managed VPS servers running our specially-designed control panel, and the feedback from our customers who are using this platform has been very positive. The team here at SiteHost have spent a lot of time testing and fine-tuning and now we are very proud to be able to officially launch this product. These previously unpublished Cloud Hosting plans are also being upgraded today.
The old Cloud Hosting plans
| Plan | Memory | International BW | Disk Space | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cirrus | 512MB | 5GB | 5GB | NZD $75 per month |
| Stratus | 1GB | 10GB | 10GB | NZD $155 per month |
| Nimbus | 2GB | 15GB | 15GB | NZD $230 per month |
| Cumulus | 4GB | 30GB | 30GB | NZD $370 per month |
| Alto | 6GB | 60GB | 60GB | NZD $555 per month |
The new Cloud Hosting plans!
| Plan | Memory | International BW | Disk Space | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cirrus | 768MB | 10GB | 5GB | NZD $75 per month |
| Stratus | 1.5GB | 25GB | 10GB | NZD $155 per month |
| Nimbus | 3GB | 50GB | 15GB | NZD $230 per month |
| Cumulus | 6GB | 70GB | 30GB | NZD $370 per month |
| Alto | 12GB | 100GB | 60GB | NZD $555 per month |
If you want to learn more about our control panel and our Cloud Hosting offering, then you can read up & sign up for them online here Articles on using the control panel system along with screenshots can be found in our knowledge-base online here
Our enterprise HA and Private Cloud customers unfortunately are not included in todays plan upgrade, but we are continually reviewing our plans so please watch this space. There are also no changes to custom quotes or plans today if you have them.
So how do I get my upgrade?
For most people, it will simply be a matter of:
- Log into the "VPS Servers" module of the Control Panel
- Select your VPS Server
- Click the "upgrades" button
- Select your new memory and press "Save changes"
Please note that your VPS will need to be restarted or in some cases migrated to a new hardware node to complete the upgrade, so it's best to organize this for a time where demand for your server will be low.
If you have Cloud Hosting services, use the SiteHost control-panel for managing websites or other SiteHost management services, then please contact us to organize for a maintenance window for this to occur. We will take care of this for you. If you have an SLA in place with SiteHost for joint management and SiteHost engineering monitoring, please let us know your maintenance window so we can schedule the downtime in our monitoring systems.
Diners & AMEX now accepted
We also now support Diners and American Express (AMEX) credit cards as a payment method. We have implemented this for a number of customers who have requested it. If you have a Diners or American Express credit card next time you need to topup your account or pay a invoice simply try it out. Please note: a 3% charge will apply for Diners and AMEX cards.
19/08/11 - Unscheduled Network Degradation
At approximately 13:00 this afternoon, Friday 19th of August, our monitoring alerted our operations engineers that there were problems accessing our Auckland City network, and investigation started straight away. Initial indications suggested that our network was being flooded with abnormally high levels of traffic, and suffering intermittent packet loss as a result. This congestion resulted in the network being extremely slow and at times effectively un-available via normal channels. Services hosted on our North Shore network would not have been affected by this incident.
It quickly became apparent that our network was being subjected to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack from within our own network. The origin of this traffic was eventually tracked down to two different physical servers, in two separate parts of the network. Once these two servers were able to be blocked, normal service for all other users was restored shortly before 14:00.
After restoring access to the network, our security specialists quarantined and investigated the two originating servers. The evidence collected showed that known vulnerabilities of out of date application installations were exploited to gain access to these servers and launch the attack. SiteHost has contacted the website owners and these websites are being secured right now. Our engineers will continue to monitor closely for any further problems over the weekend.
We take security very seriously here at SiteHost, and are constantly looking for better ways to manage and mitigate the many risks that exist on the internet today. While we have come under DoS attacks in the past, we have learnt a number of things from this incident, and will be making changes as a result to ensure that when something like this occurs in the future we can minimize customer impact and reduce the time of resolution.
It is also a good reminder of the importance of keeping your servers and website applications patched and up to date. We would ask all of our customers to be vigilant in this respect, as we have seen a marked increase in security threats and exploitations over the past 12 months.
We would also like to acknowledge all those who have contacted us so far expressing your understanding and support for us. While no-one can guarantee their service will never be affected by this type of incident, what we can promise is that whenever something like this occurs, we will have a plan for restoring service, and we will carry this out as quickly as possible, while keeping you informed via email / twitter (please feel free to follow @sitehostnz on twitter for regular updates) in a timely fashion.
SiteHost sincerely apologise to all impacted customers for any inconvenience caused.
13/05/11 - Scheduled Maintenance affecting International & Domestic Connectivity
We have an upcoming scheduled event which may affect some customers. On Friday the 13th of May 2011 between 00:00 - 06:00 we are going to be performing some network equipment upgrades.
These changes will be carried out with minimal disruption, as we will fail over to our secondary links ahead of time & have planned to keep the periods of unavailability as short as possible but there is a chance of some connectivity being affected. Engineers will be onsite during these changes & we will be monitoring our network both during & after to ensure minimal impact to our customers.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
15/02/11 - Scheduled Maintenance International & Domestic Connectivity
We have an upcoming scheduled event which may affect some customers. On Tuesday the 15th of February 2011 between 00:00 - 06:00 we are going to be performing a router upgrade & making some scheduled changes with our upstream providers.
These changes will be carried out with minimal disruption, as we will fail over to our secondary links ahead of time & have planned to keep the periods of unavailability as short as possible but there is a chance of some connectivity being affected. Engineers will be onsite during these changes & we will be monitoring our network both during & after to ensure minimal impact to our customers.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
28/01/11 - Domestic Connectivity Issues
At approximately 12:45pm on the 28th of January 2011, one of our upstream network providers experienced a loss of power to core networking equipment. The SiteHost network failed over almost immediately with a possible 90 seconds of domestic service disruption while the networks upstream reconverged for those affected. There was no loss of international service as a result of this incident.
Our monitoring alerted us to the issue immediately & SiteHost engineers observed that this caused all traffic traversing our upstream provider's network to failover to international links, which would have experienced some service disruption due to network congestion. A small number of SiteHost customers connecting to our network needed to be manually failed over so may have noticed about 10 minutes service disruption. Our upstream provider's service was restored at approximately 13:15pm.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
13/01/11 - International Connectivity Issue
On the 12th of January, at approximately 17:32 our primary international provider experienced a denial of service attack resulting in intermittent packet loss affecting connectivity to overseas locations. Our monitoring detected this & engineers immediately began investigating.
At 17:45 our engineers failed over to our secondary link restoring service for customers shortly after. Service was fully restored at approximately 18:02. Our upstream transit provider advised us at 18:15 the issue was resolved & our engineers failed back to our primary circuit at approximately 19:00.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
28/10/10 - NZ VPS Plan Upgrades
Firstly, we'd like to thank you for using our services.
We have recently reviewed our pricing on International bandwidth, and have decided we want to offer more International mileage on our hosting plans.
As a result we are pleased to announce our new plans, effective immediately for new customers, and from the 1st of November for existing customers.
The old plans
| Plan | Memory | International BW | Disk Space | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xen Lite | 384MB | 3GB | 5.0GB | NZD $30 per month |
| Xen Pro | 768MB | 8GB | 10.0GB | NZD $60 per month |
| Xen Extreme | 1.5GB | 10GB | 15.0GB | NZD $95 per month |
| Xen Ultimate | 3GB | 20GB | 30.0GB | NZD $165 per month |
| Xen 6GB | 6GB | 40GB | 60.0GB | NZD $320 per month |
| Xen 12GB | 12GB | 100GB | 120.0GB | NZD $620 per month |
The new plans!
| Plan | Memory | International BW | Disk Space | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xen Lite | 384MB | 10GB | 5.0GB | NZD $30 per month | SIGN UP |
| Xen Pro | 768MB | 25GB | 10.0GB | NZD $60 per month | SIGN UP |
| Xen Extreme | 1.5GB | 50GB | 15.0GB | NZD $95 per month | SIGN UP |
| Xen Ultimate | 3GB | 70GB | 30.0GB | NZD $165 per month | SIGN UP |
| Xen 6GB | 6GB | 100GB | 60.0GB | NZD $320 per month | SIGN UP |
| Xen 12GB | 12GB | 200GB | 120.0GB | NZD $620 per month | SIGN UP |
So how do I get my upgrade?
Just sit back and relax. You don't need to do anything!
Thank you once again for your continued support.
20/10/10 - TelstraClear and Telecom Routing Issue
On the 20th of October, at approximately 05:30 one of our upstream providers completed some network changes which inadvertently created a routing loop affecting access to our network for some users of TelstraClear and Telecom services. This issue only affected dedicated and co-located servers. SiteHost engineers first noticed anomalous activity at 06:30 and immediately started investigating. The exact nature and extent of the fault was initially unknown until 08:30 when customers first began informing us they were also affected. Once we identified the exact fault, our engineering staff were able to quickly pin-point the problem and begin talking with the appropriate personnel upstream who restored normal service at approximately 09:45.
The troubleshooting of this fault was complicated by the limited scope of affected customers, who only began reporting problems to us after 08:15. In addition, no notification of configuration change from our upstream provider was sent out as they did not anticipate that there could be any impact on service. Our upstream provider have advised us that they are continuing to liaise with TelstraClear in regards to some unexplained activity which they have reported as causing the disruption in service, and are taking steps to prevent a re-occurrence of the issue. They have also agreed to notify our engineers of any network changes such as this in the future, which would greatly speed up the analysis process if something like this re-occurred.
SiteHost is committed to providing excellent service and as a result of this we have increased our monitoring of networks external to our own, which in the future will increase our awareness of external problems affecting our customers and speed up identifying the root causes.
It should be noted that we were not the only provider affected by this fault and due to the interconnected nature of the Internet we rely heavily on our peers to ensure customers on our network continue to receive an excellent service.
This incident was caused by human error outside of the SiteHost network, and while the scope was limited, it did have a noticeable impact on the availability of service for customers who connect through TelstraClear and Telecom. We would like to apologise for the inconvenience and thank those customers who assisted our team in tracking this issue.
18/10/10 - SiteHost Scheduled Maintenance
We have the following upcoming scheduled events which will affect the availability of all services. Please read below for more information.
- Outage Time: 0000 - 0600 hours
- Outage Date: Monday 18th October 2010
- Expected Duration: 1 minute
- Possible Duration: 15 minutes
- Impact: All Customers
As part of our continual efforts to improve reliability & performance on our network we have added a new transit provider. On Monday we will be turning this portion of our network on. We do not expect any loss of service doing this, but there is a risk of a small blip while updates are received.
Thank you for your understanding & patience with us as we perform this network upgrade.
15/10/10 - SiteHost Scheduled Maintenance
We have the following upcoming scheduled events which will affect the availability of all services. Please read below for more information.
- Outage Time: 0200 - 0600 hours
- Outage Date: Friday 15th October 2010
- Expected Duration: A number of short outages
- Possible Duration: 60 minutes
- Impact: All Customers
We are upgrading our network to the reliability and speed of the services we provide to you. As part of completing this work we will be testing our failover mechanisms.
There will be a number of short periods of time between 2am and 6am on Friday the 15th of October 2010 during which our network will be unavailable. These periods should not exceed more than a few minutes each.
We apologise for any inconvenience these outages may cause.
05/10/10 - Vector Connectivity Issues 00:17 - 01:06
On the 5th of October, at approximately 00:17 hours, SiteHost monitoring systems alerted engineers that there were multiple faults, at both City & North Shore physical sites. The issue was immediately investigated. Service was restored at 01:06, resulting in approximately 50 minutes of service disruption.
Upon discussions with suppliers at both locations we were advised of a power-related fault at a major Vector node in Auckland CBD. This caused service issues for several Vector customers, including our Auckland City primary supplier of international connectivity & all datacenter connectivity to our North Shore site.
We are discussing options with our suppliers to mitigate this issue in the future, but it should be noted that customers may have been unable to access various services hosted on our network as several other providers were also affected by this outage.
We apologize for any inconvenience this outage may have caused.
30/09/10 - SiteHost Scheduled Maintenance
We have the following upcoming scheduled events which will affect the availability of all Auckland City services. Please read below for more information.
- Outage Time: 0200 - 0600 hours
- Outage Date: Thursday 30th September 2010
- Expected Duration: A number of short outages
- Possible Duration: 60 minutes
- Impact: All Auckland City Customers, Low risk to North Shore customers.
We are upgrading our network to the reliability and speed of the services we provide to you. As part of completing this work we will be testing our failover mechanisms.
There will be a number of short periods of time between 2am and 6am on Thursday the 30th of September 2010 during which our network will be unavailable. These periods should not exceed more than a few minutes each.
We apologise for any inconvenience this outage may cause.
07/09/10 - NZ VPS Plan Upgrades
Firstly, we'd like to thank our customers for using our services. We are constantly encouraged by the feedback we get from our customers and we are pleased to be able to announce a series of upgrades just for you.
Our engineers have been working around the clock to complete migrations onto new equipment for you. We have provisioned new servers that offer leading VPS performance in the NZ market, and we are also now upgrading our VPS Hosting Plans so that our loyal customers get better hosting than ever.
Our new plans and upgraded servers are available for all customers from today.
The old plans
| Plan | Memory | International BW | Disk Space | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xen Lite | 256MB | 3GB | 5.0GB | $30 per month |
| Xen Pro | 512MB | 8GB | 10.0GB | $60 per month |
| Xen Extreme | 1GB | 10GB | 15.0GB | $95 per month |
| Xen Ultimate | 2GB | 20GB | 30.0GB | $165 per month |
| Xen 4GB | 4GB | 40GB | 60.0GB | $320 per month |
The new plans!
| Plan | Memory | International BW | Disk Space | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xen Lite | 384MB | 3GB | 5.0GB | NZD $30 per month | SIGN UP |
| Xen Pro | 768MB | 8GB | 10.0GB | NZD $60 per month | SIGN UP |
| Xen Extreme | 1.5GB | 10GB | 15.0GB | NZD $95 per month | SIGN UP |
| Xen Ultimate | 3GB | 20GB | 30.0GB | NZD $165 per month | SIGN UP |
| Xen 6GB | 6GB | 40GB | 60.0GB | NZD $320 per month | SIGN UP |
| Xen 12GB | 12GB | 100GB | 120.0GB | NZD $620 per month | SIGN UP |
Notice the RAM upgrades for the same price. And don't forget the new high performance hardware running our VPS servers.
So how do I get my upgrade?
For most people, it will simply be a matter of:
- Log into the "VPS Servers" module of the Control Panel
- Select your VPS Server
- Click the "Memory" menu item (top/right)
- Select your new memory and press "Upgrade memory"
Please note that your VPS will need to be restarted to complete the upgrade, so it's best to organize this for a time where demand for your server will be low.
Some customers may be prompted to select a timeslot for our engineers to schedule the migration and upgrade of your server. Simply choose a time that is convenient for you and our team will take care of the rest.
But wait ... there's more!
Our team is working hard to make even more upgrades available in the next few months. We will also be soon announcing new products we are developing in-house to further improve our Cloud Computing platform and Control Panel, so watch this space!
Any questions?
If you have any questions about this email, or encounter any issues at all when performing your upgrades, you can email support@sitehost.co.nz and we will get back to you asap.
Thank you once again for your continued support.
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.
- Outage Time: 0200 - 0600 hours
- Outage Date: Tuesday 10th & Tuesday 17th August 2010
- Expected Duration: 30 minutes
- Possible Duration: 180 minutes
- Impact: All North Shore Customers
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.
- Outage Time: 0200 - 0600 hours
- Outage Date: Wednesday 9th September 2009
- Expected Duration: 60 minutes
- Possible Duration: 180 minutes
- Impact: VPS Customers with an IP address starting in: 120.138.18.x
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.
- Outage Time: 0200 - 0600 hours
- Outage Date: Thursday 20th August 2009
- Expected Duration: 10 minutes
- Possible Duration: 60 minutes
- Impact: All VPS Customers
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.
- Outage Time: 0200 - 0600 hours
- Outage Date: Friday 10th July 2009
- Expected Duration: 10 minutes
- Possible Duration: 60 minutes
- Impact: All Auckland City VPS Customers
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.
"Just wanted to say thanks for the excellent service you gave me in the process of setting up my VPS. Your expert knowledge helped me to get up and running really quickly, and I will definitely recommend you to anybody who has web hosting needs."