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.

08/05/13 - Scheduled Network Upgrades

We want to let you know about a scheduled network upgrade. This maintenance is not expected to cause any network connectivity outages as we will completely failover prior to conducting this work. This is however a network change and as such we are will be taking all necessary precautions to minimize the potential for any disruption to service.

Outage Time: 0000 - 0600 hours
Outage Date: Thursday 9th May 2013
Expected Duration: 2 hour
Possible Duration: 6 hours
Impact: None expected, but potential increased latency / brief loss of service during convergence

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

17/04/13 - Scheduled Network Upgrades

We want to let you know about a scheduled major network infrastructure upgrade. This maintenance may cause intermittent network connectivity outages as we test our network failover & reboot network equipment with updated firmware & configurations. We expect servers on the network to experience only brief network outages in the order of 1-5 minutes during convergence. This is however a major network change window so we are allocating a 6 hour maintenance window should any issues arise.

Outage Time: 0000 - 0600 hours
Outage Date: Friday 19th April 2013
Expected Duration: 2 hour
Possible Duration: 6 hours
Impact: SiteHost Primary Facility Servers

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

05/04/13 - Scheduled Network Upgrades - Hazard Notice

To improve the performance of our international network we will be making some minor network changes tonight, we do not expect any downtime but are posting this notice so customers are aware that we are conducting this work. Appologies for the short notice, recent incidents have brought this work forward & we now consider this urgent.

Scheduled Maintenance Window: 0000 - 0200 hours
Outage Date: Saturday 6th April 2013
Expected Duration: 2 hour
Possible Duration: 6 hours
Impact: Increased latency to SiteHost customers International Connectivity

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

07/03/13 - Unscheduled Network Outage

At approximately 01:08, Thursday the 7th of March, our monitoring alerted our operations engineers that there were problems affecting our network. We began investigating and discovered network issues resulting in intermittent packet loss and at times complete network loss affecting all customers at our Auckland City facility.

At the time SiteHost engineers spoke to our upstream suppliers support staff who advised us the issues were potentially related to a single upstream network provider having issues on their network causing a range of issues across these diverse upstream networks. SiteHost maintain an out-of-band management network and access to this was also affected making diagnostics more difficult than we would have liked.

Despite some connectivity being restored around 04:00 our engineers observed issues via some paths which we began attempting to diagnose. While diagnosing these issues we continued to experience brief periods where connectivity was degraded or completely lost. After some troubleshooting, our engineers restored connectivity at approximately 06:00.

Upon further investigation the following day, it was discovered that at least 2 completely separate network devices on the SiteHost network were running but not allowing traffic to pass through. We are still working with our partners to understand why this happened. We are also still waiting on an incident report from one of our upstream suppliers to help us understand why their network went down.

The SiteHost network is fault tolerant, using diverse paths and will fail over in the event a network device completely fails, unfortunately it was not possible for our network to failover when this behaviour was observed. Restarting the affected process restored these devices to be fully functional again, we have been monitoring this since and these issues have not reoccurred.

This was perhaps the most challenging and certainly the longest network incident we have experienced since we began managing our own network 4 years ago, for the following reasons:

  1. Multiple upstream failed concurrently, delaying access to begin diagnosing issues.
  2. SiteHost out-of-band management network access was affected.
  3. SiteHost network devices malfunctioned silently.

We have learnt a lot from this incident and have a number of changes planned to improve the diversity, monitoring and ultimately the reliability of our network - some of these changes were easy and have already been done, others will take us several weeks to complete.

We would like to take the time to apologise for this extremely inconvenient service interruption. We would like to remind customers to please feel free to follow @sitehostnz on twitter for regular updates in the event of any network issues in the future.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading and thank you for your continued support,

Quintin Russ
Technical Director - SiteHost

19/02/13 - Scheduled Network Upgrades - Part 2

Following the successful network maintenance overnight on the morning of the 19th, SiteHost engineers still have a number of outstanding items which we need to undertake in order to complete our network upgrade. This maintenance is similar in its nature to the work carried out overnight so it may cause intermittent network connectivity as we switch over to new equipment. We expect each server to experience only brief network outages in the order of 1-5 minutes during convergence. This is however a major network upgrade so we are allocating a 6 hour maintenance window should any issues arise.

Outage Time: 0000 - 0600 hours
Outage Date: Wednesday 20th February 2013
Expected Duration: 2 hour
Possible Duration: 6 hours
Impact: SiteHost Primary Facility Servers

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

14/02/13 - Scheduled Network Upgrades - Part 1

We want to let you know about a scheduled major network infrastructure upgrade. This maintenance may cause intermittent network connectivity as we switch over to new equipment. We expect each server to experience only brief network outages in the order of 1-5 minutes during convergence. This is however a major network upgrade so we are allocating a 6 hour maintenance window should any issues arise.

Outage Time: 0000 - 0600 hours
Outage Date: Tuesday 19th February 2013
Expected Duration: 2 hour
Possible Duration: 6 hours
Impact: SiteHost Primary Facility Servers

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

23/11/12 - Unscheduled Network Outage

At approximately 11:11, Friday the 23rd of November, our monitoring alerted our operations engineers that there were problems affecting some routes out of our network. We began investigating and found that one of our upstreams had experienced a hardware failure causing a network outage and for some routes including all international transit these had not failed over correctly. Once our engineers had identified the fault service was restored at approximately 11:33.

We also experienced several more faults with this upstream provider over the 23rd, 24th & 25th, but these would have gone largely unnoticed as our network failed over as expected on these occassions. Upon investigation into the root cause for our network not failing over it was determined a configuration change made a few weeks earlier was the cause & we have already adjusted our testing processes to ensure more thorough testing is carried out to prevent this from occuring again in the future.

We would like to take the time to appologise for this extremely inconvenient service interruption. While no-one can guarantee their service will never be affected by downtime, 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.

07/09/12 - .kiwi.nz Provisional Registration Available to Pre-Order Now!

Today, we have enabled .kiwi.nz pre-registrations for domain names. As this second level domain has not yet gone "live" there are a few things you need to know:

Feel free to get pre-ordering today!

06/08/12 - Shared Mail & Shared Hosting Scheduled Maintenance

We have some scheduled maintenance affecting customers using our Shared Mail & Shared Hosting services on the 7th of August 2012 between 00:00 - 06:00. We do not expect the downtime to exceed 60 minutes.

These changes are required to help improve the reliability of our systems, which suffered from some unscheduled downtime last week.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

02/08/12 - Mail Server Load Issues

Customers receiving e-mail today through mx1.sitehost.co.nz may have experienced delays receiving & sending emails. This was due to unexpected increase in demand on our servers. This issue is now resolved, and our engineers are monitoring the server closely. Upgrades are being planned, and will roll out soon.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

01/08/12 - International Domains SRS Issues

Due to unscheduled upstream system changes, there have been some intermittent problems with updates to international domain-names through our control panel online and through our API, over the past 24 hours. We have just been advised that upstream engineers are working on the problem, and hope to have service back to normal in the next 24 hours. SRS jobs are queued and so most should be pushed through eventually, but if you notice (or have noticed) any unsuccessful requests for .com or other international TLD's please e-mail support@sitehost.co.nz.

New Zealand .nz domain-names are not affected at all by this.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

05/06/12 - www.sitehost.co.nz now running on IPv6

Today we are pleased to announce for the first time ever that this website www.sitehost.co.nz is running on an IPv6 address.

Some of you will know we have been working hard on enabling IPv6 across all our services for some time now. Tomorrow the 6th of June is World IPv6 Launch (www.worldipv6launch.org) an initiative designed to motivate organizations to prepare for and permanently enable IPv6 on their products and services. With this in mind we thought now seemed a great time to provide an update on where we are at with IPv6.

We are big advocates of automation here at SiteHost which has meant a lot of re-factoring of code and re-architecting of a number of systems to make them work with the new addressing scheme. Our IPv6 project is without a doubt the biggest undertaking since we started in 2005. There are a number of things still to do - but for the most part we are very pleased with our progress.

For example we are now able to provision a fully dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6) VPS (Windows or Linux) and have it work on the Internet. Our hope is to provide our customers with their own IPv6 addresses as soon as we've ironed out all the kinks! We are hoping this will be by the end of 2012, but we need to get a few things done before we can do that.

We will keep you posted!

21/05/12 - International Bandwidth price decrease

We are pleased to announce that new NZ hosting plans from today will have any excess international charged at $1.00 + GST per GB. Our entire team have been working hard for some months now upgrading existing networking equipment and adding extra capacity which has made it possible for us to lower our pricing for additional international bandwidth.

Historically we have been very limited in what we have been able to offer in this area, while we believe there is much work to still be done we are proud to be able to offer more competitive bandwidth options to both new and current hosting customers.

For new NZ hosting customers these changes take effect immediately from today, for existing customers on SiteHost IPv4 address space (120.138.xx.xxx) these pricing changes take effect from the 1st of June 2012.

Sadly, we also have a small number of existing customers on legacy address space who we are unable to offer this pricing change to so these customers will continue to have their excess bandwidth charged at $2.00 + GST per GB. If you're on one of these addresses please get in touch with us today to help you migrate onto our network.

10/05/12 - Scheduled Network Upgrades

We have an upcoming scheduled event which may affect some customers. On Thursday the 10th of May 2012 between 00:00 - 06:00 we are going to be performing some network upgrades.

These changes will be carried out with minimal disruption, as we will fail over to our secondary links ahead of time we do not anticipate loss of service. There is however 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.

04/05/12 - Unscheduled Network Outage

At approximately 07:20, Friday the 4th of May, our monitoring alerted our operations engineers that there were problems accessing our Auckland City network which is colocated in the ICONZ datacenter, and investigation started straight away. Initial indications suggested a power failure on multiple core network switches causing a complete network outage. Availability of these devices was restored at approximately 07:40 and most customers would have noticed service restored at this point. Once service was restored some customers may have noticed intermittent packet loss causing slow network performance which was corrected at approximately 08:40.

The intermittent packet loss was due to a complete loss of communications between the high availability systems in our routers, causing high load & several other network related anomalies. Once these network issues were resolved, our engineers then began investigating the root cause. It was discovered that our colocation provider had some scheduled maintenance between 05:00 - 09:00 that morning, which our engineering team were advised was network related and due to the redundant nature of the SiteHost network was not expected to have any significant impact.

Unknown to our engineers the maintenance also included restarting a single (1) access switch which is located inside our non-shared cabinets. It is understood following several conversations that their technician mistakenly restarted multiple (2) SiteHost managed switches which are not in any way owned or operated by our colocation provider. This basic oversight had significant consequences for us as while our team has worked hard building a fault tolerant network it was not possible for the network to recover from the removal of multiple devices.

SiteHost have strict processes in place for access of equipment in our cabinets & have been let down by our provider in communicating what work was being carried out. We have reiterated to our suppliers that we expect to be informed of any & all access to our locked cabinets & will be looking at any changes we can make to ensure this occurs in the future.

In addition to this, our team has in the last few months been upgrading our core network, this work has been completed at our North Shore facility and we expect to be completed with this upgrade in the next few weeks. This upgrade will see our core network components housed in separate cabinets which when combined with a number of other planned improvements should make it significantly harder to repeat the service interruption you experienced last Friday.

We would like to take the time to appologise for this extremely inconvenient service interruption. While no-one can guarantee their service will never be affected by downtime, 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.

30/03/12 - Scheduled Network Upgrades

We have an upcoming scheduled event which may affect some customers. On Tuesday the 3rd of April 2012 between 00:00 - 06:00 we are going to be performing some network upgrades.

These changes will be carried out with minimal disruption, as we will fail over to our secondary links ahead of time we do not anticipate loss of service. There is however 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.

21/03/12 - Dedicated Server Plan Upgrades

We are pleased to announce our latest Dedicated Server plans - for the first time offering SSD.

The old Cold Swap Server plans

CPU RAM Hard Disk 12 Month Term 24 Month Term 36 Month Term
E2200 4GB 2 x 500GB $250.00 monthly $240.00 monthly $215.00 monthly
Q9300 8GB 2 x 500GB $280.00 monthly $270.00 monthly $235.00 monthly
Q8200 8GB 4 x 500GB $310.00 monthly $300.00 monthly $265.00 monthly

The new Cold Swap Server plans

CPU RAM Hard Disk 12 Month Term 24 Month Term 36 Month Term
E2200 4GB 2x500GB $250.00 monthly $240.00 monthly $215.00 monthly
Q8200 8GB 4x500GB $295.00 monthly $285.00 monthly $245.00 monthly
Q9300 8GB 4x120GB SSD $350.00 monthly $340.00 monthly $280.00 monthly

The old Hot Swap Server plans

CPU RAM Hard Disk 12 Month Term 24 Month Term 36 Month Term
i7-930 12GB 4 x 1TB $360.00 monthly $350.00 monthly $285.00 monthly
i7-960 24GB 6 x 500GB $420.00 monthly $410.00 monthly $330.00 monthly
Xeon X3440 32GB 6 x 500GB $480.00 monthly $470.00 monthly $370.00 monthly

The new Hot Swap Server plans

CPU RAM Hard Disk 12 Month Term 24 Month Term 36 Month Term
i7-930 12GB 4x1TB $365.00 monthly $355.00 monthly $290.00 monthly
Xeon X3440 16GB 6x500GB $440.00 monthly $430.00 monthly $345.00 monthly
Xeon X3440 32GB 6x120GB SSD $510.00 monthly $500.00 monthly $390.00 monthly

See our Dedicated Server page for further details and to signup.

15/03/12 - Critical Windows Server Update

Here at SiteHost we think security is important which is why we keep a close eye on security adviseries that are released and make an effort to update our provisioning images any time a relevant vulnerability fix is issued.

As part of this process we also want to bring major security issues to the attention of our customers who may not be aware of them. As part of yesterdays 'Patch Tuesday' Microsoft released an update to the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) application. This update affects a wide range of windows products (including windows server 2008) which if left unpatched could allow an attacker remote code execution on a target machine.

For more information please see the details on Microsoft's website: here

SiteHost strongly recommends you take this opportunity to patch your server. Please get in touch with us if we can assist with this.

29/02/12 - Windows VPS Launch

Today we are very pleased to announce official support for Windows Virtual Private Servers. We constantly hear people asking us to recommend a good Windows Hosting Company in New Zealand. Today we can finally say "We are!"

Having a solid reputation managing & automating Linux servers our engineers have been hard at work, automating Windows & we think we've done a pretty good job.

Like many of our offerings, provisioning of your server is automated and provisioned in minutes. No more waiting for "an engineer" to provision your server, simply login to the SiteHost Control Panel and provision your server in minutes - 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year!

We think being in control of your server is pretty important which is why our Windows Virtual Private Servers come with our standard web-based tools:

Try us out today, if you decide our Windows Virtual Private Server offering is not for you, simply cancel within 30 days and pay nothing!

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:

  1. Log into the "VPS Servers" module of the Control Panel
  2. Select your VPS Server
  3. Click the "upgrades" button
  4. 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.

 

"Service is a key benefit of working with SiteHost. I have been impressed with the speed and efficiency with which they respond to queries. It is always a pleasure to deal with the team. "

F. Ritchie