Changes to support and clarification on responsibilities for website hosting clients

We’re making some changes to how we handle support enquiries, and would like to clarify what is supported.

One issue per case

We are making a change to the number of separate issues that can be answered in a single case.

Please only raise one issue per case. This is to help decrease resolution time and make cases simpler for our support team.

We have seen an increasing number of cases where customers try to cover multiple issues from within the same case. While this may seem more efficient, it can actually slow down the process as cases sometimes need to be passed around staff with differing skill sets.

Of course, it will still be possible for you to draw our attention to another related case. However, any customers raising a case with multiple issues may be asked to submit separate cases.

Support for deprecated software

We are making changes that relate to deprecated or out of date software.

In supporting our customers, we’ve often come across situations where the issue relates to the end customer running out of date or out of support software or issues relating to operating systems, web browsers, and email software etc.

Spending time diagnosing issues, only to find out that the reason behind those issues is software incompatibility, is a waste of valuable time (and we include the customer’s time in that statement) and resources and not something we should reasonably be expected to support. Continuing support for out of date software and code frameworks introduce significant security issues and inhibits our ability to offer more up to date services.

As a result, our support team will no longer be able to provide support where we identify this is a contributing or causal factor. We will also no longer be able to provide support where issues relate to web applications that are out of vendor support, have not been updated to current major versions, or where web applications are running on out of support code frameworks.

One example of this would-be customers who are still choosing to operate their code or application on PHP 5.6, when the current in support versions of PHP are above 7.1. While we provide the frameworks to customers in order to provide a wide range of compatibility, it is unrealistic for us to support issues relating to those frameworks.

For dedicated server or cloud customers who are running older versions of operating systems and wish to upgrade, please contact our Sales team who will be happy to talk you through upgrade options.

Clarification on responsibilities for website hosting support

We always want to help our customers as much as we can, but it’s important that we all recognise the things that fall outside of our areas of responsibility.

Examples of some of the questions we’ve been asked, but fall outside of our area of support responsibility are; how to use client software, such as a mail application or FTP client, how to format an email signature, how to design a web page, debugging code, and fixing no longer functioning phones or laptops. Although we can usually provide paid support in most instances, or refer you to a more suitable technical support service.

Where a customer has purchased a dedicated server, virtual machine or cloud server, we also don’t provide training in administering them. If you have purchased a server but don’t know how to administer, our sales team will be more than happy to tell you all about managed services.

We do, of course, administer the systems that we are responsible for and do everything we possibly can to keep our servers and services running around the clock, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. It’s important for us to stress that we remain committed to delivering excellent support and are always here to support issues with our service.

We recognise that sometimes it’s not clear if the fault lies at your end or ours. So of course, we’ll investigate, and where the fault is ours, fix it as fast as humanly possible. Or, where it’s not our fault, we’ll often be able to point you in the right direction.

The changes we have made are to increase our transparency and ensure that we are able to provide a fair and consistent support policy. This ensures that updating our systems is something we can do with confidence.