Hightek Hosting unleashes the power of the internet to homes and businesses around the world by providing superior customer support, leading-edge technologies and value-added tools needed to create, host, support and manage your account.

Hightek Hosting supports a large variety of internet tools and technologies, some of which can be quite complex.

To assist our customers with their technical needs, Hightek Hosting offer an extensive online support system complete with online tutorials, knowledgebase articles and video demonstrations. Hightek Hosting also maintains an online support ticket system and an online chat messaging systems as well as our standard customer service and support team, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

For a detailed outline of our Standard Support Procedures and Parameters, please see below.

Hightek Hosting Standard Support Procedures

For quick and efficient resolution to your issue, please follow these steps:

Refer to Hightek Hosting's Support Page ( http://www.hightekhosting.com.au/support.php ) Our knowledgbase and video tutorials will provide fast, effective answers to many of your questions.

Our network issues page ( https://www.hightekhosting.com.au/myaccount/networkissues.php ) will outline any Known, Scheduled and Resolved network issues within the Hightek Hosting network. This page covers all products and services provided by Hightek Hosting.

Our server status page ( http://www.hightekhosting.com.au/myaccount/serverstatus.php ) will provide you with a page outlining the status of Hightek Hosting's shared & reseller hosting services. This page is updated live, however, please be aware that the page is subject to timeouts during its connection tests, so the live status may not always be correct. If a service is showing down/offline, check our Network Issues page for more information before lodging a Support Ticket.

You may also log into the MyAccount Portal ( https://www.hightekhosting.com.au/myaccount/clientarea.php ) and open a Support Ticket if you cannot find a solution to your enquiry.

We recommend that you check the above based resources before opening a support ticket as it may in turn save you time in obtaining the information you require.

Although we prefer the use of the online ticket system for most enquiries and issues, Hightek Hosting does offer it's customers phone support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You can contact us anytime on 1300 85 34 30 for assistance.

Contacting Support & Obtaining Technical Support

If the customer is experiencing difficulties or issues with your hosting or any of their services, you are required to notify us of the issue immediately, so we may resolve the issue. If you do not notify us of the problem, no allowances will be made, as we have not been given a reasonable opportunity to resolve the issue. We are an Internet Presence Provider (IPP) and are not responsible for the users Internet Connectivity through their Internet Service Provider (ISP), connection troubleshooting or computer setup. Please contact your ISP for assistance in these matters. You must allow a reasonable time period for your issues to be resolved.

Live assistance is not always available 24/7 and should not be relied upon as a primary form of technical support. As such, if you require any technical support, it is suggested and preferred that a support ticket be lodged via our client area. This ensures that our technical team will receive your request and respond as quickly as possible.

Live chat is subject to staff availability and a 5 minute idle time. If you choose to utilise our live chat facility, please take into account that we may close/cancel a live chat session if an idle time of 5 minutes or more is experienced. If you choose to log onto live chat, you must respond to our operator within 5 minutes otherwise we may close/end the chat session.

For each issue with your account, a separate support ticket must be logged. When logging support tickets, it is important and vital that you provide us with:

- Details as to the issue you are experiencing.
- Details of any error messages you are receiving (if any)
- Username and password details to the account that is experiencing the issue
- What steps you may have taken to check this issue further (if possible)
- Any domain or account details, such as software login, management or child login details..

Failure to provide enough information may result in your support ticket being rejected or assistance taking longer than normal.

Regardless of if an issue has been mentioned in a previous ticket, it should all be lodged as separate tickets so as we can accurately track the status of your account and the work performed to it. This is also required as a method of being able to see what work has been performed to your account over time as well as an audit trail to compare with.

This also matters on a legal standing, that should details of your account and its work be called up by a legal team at any time, we are able to produce such details upon legal request.

Accounts & Billing Support

As part of our commitment to customer security, we require a large majority of our accounts & billing enquiries to be submitted via a support ticket to our Accounts & Billing Department.

This is to ensure that we are providing the correct information to the correct person and that we are not simply "handing out" secure billing and account information to just anyone.

As normal, some accounts enquiries can be handled over the phone or via our live support methods, however, if we request that a ticket be provided, it is for your own security.

A ticket also ensures that we maintain a documented history of what information was provided, to who, and when it was provided.

It is also a legal security requirement that we only provide information regarding accounts to authorised contact persons.

Under no circumstances will we ever release any secure account information to any contact without the correct documentation in place.

We will also never request your credit card number to be provided by email. We may request the last 4 digits for security purposes, but we will never ask you to confirm your full credit card number via email. This is for your own security.

If we ever require your credit card details to be updated or any important billing information, we will ask you to either log in to our MyAccount Portal to update your details securly (when involving a credit card) or if it is a matter of updating contact details such as address or contact details, we will ask for a ticket to ensure that a documented history of these changes is made for both security and legal reasons.

Please do not be offended if we decline to offer support or information regarding accounts over the phone or via live chat as we are simply ensuring our customer security is maintained.

Support Ticket Departments

When lodging a support ticket, please be aware of the following information.

It is important that you ensure your support ticket is lodged with the correct deparment in order to ensure that accurate support is provided.

The following outlines those deparments and where issues should be lodged:

Technical Support	For all techincal support enquires for services such as shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, co-location. This includes software support and error message resolutions
Sales	For all sales & product enquiries, including shared, reseller, VPS, dedicated and co-location. This also includes SSL certificates or any other product/service that Hightek Hosting may offer
Accounts & Billing	For all accounts related enquiries, such as payments, refunds, credits, invoices, change of payment methods or contact details
Domains Team	For all domain enquiries, such as nameserver changes, propogation matters, new registrations, renewals or transfers
Customer Feedback	For general customer feedback or complaints.

Support Ticket Priorites

When lodging a ticket via the, you as the customer are given the option to select a priorty.

Whilst we appreciate that everyone would like their issue solved "now", there are corrrect prorities to ensure that correct support is provided when you need it most.

The following is an outline of those priorites and when they should be used

Low	This priority is moreso for advisory or notification to us that something requires attention, but the issue is not "life threatening" or URGENT.
Medium	For all general support related issues
High	This priority should only be set if you are experiencing an outage or serious error message that is affecting the operation of your product or service. This is for URGENT related matters only.

Support tickets are dealt with in order of priority and are on a "first come, first served" basis, however, if inaccurate or insufficient information is provided, this may delay your ticket.

How do I know if my issue is considered urgent or not?

Basically, an urgent issue is deemded to be that of the following:

• Error message affecting primary site/service operations
• Service outage or downtime that is preventing your site or service from being active or operated

Note: Hightek Hosting reserves the right to upgrade or downgrade a ticket priority based on our determination of the issue. If a ticket is found to be lodged at the incorrect priority level, it will be adjusted and attended to accordingly.

Software Support & Assistance

In regards to this, our support on software and CMS (Content Management Systems) is very limited.

We can only offer limited support on this software purely because although it may be a part of a package offered, such as Fantastico or cPanel, we cannot offer direct technical support on it. It is suggested that you contact the software developer or your website developer for assistance on your chosen software product for support and advise if you experience technical issues.

Under our support, we do however cover issues such as:
- Limited advice on how to resolve some issues.
- Details of what an error may be related to.
- Limited server or service reconfiguration (if found to be a direct issue with our configuration, not an issue with your configuration)
- What steps you may of taken to check this issue further (if possible)
- Issues with cPanel, WHM or the physical server software that publishes your WebPages.

Under our support, we do not cover issues such as:
- Development or coding issues
- Modifications, upgrades or migrations
- Reconfigurations to your chosen system to work with our systems

Most software products will work on our server systems and require very little adjustment. If in doubt, check the system requirements and request technical support from the software developers or your website developer.

Any work we do carry out on your website software to do with upgrades, modification installations, migrations or coding issues may be subject to a "Workshop Labour" charge, as it falls under "Web Development" and is not covered by our standard hosting agreement. See our IT Services page for details on these charges.

If you are a client who has a Server Management plan with us, this also applies to you. We will only ever offer technical support for the server software however no additional third party software can be easily supported due to the nature of each product being different.

Products we will cover with our technical support are:
- cPanel/WHM (unless unmanaged service - VPS, Dedicated & Colocation Services)
- PHP, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, TomCat
- Operating System Issues
- RVSiteBuilder (unless unmanaged service - VPS, Dedicated & Colocation Services)
- General Fantastico issues (does not apply to software that is installed by Fantastico)
- Virtuozzo Power Panel/Containers (unless unmanaged service - VPS, Dedicated & Colocation Services)

Technical support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, however, not all contact methods are operated 24 hours a day. Effectively, our phone and email support is available 24 hours a day, with live chat, MSN and Skype available at various time points throughout these 24 hour cycles. Not all methods are available at once. Should you consider your matter urgent, you may choose to phone us 24 hours a day for assistance.

If you have any questions about what we cover or don't cover, feel free to lodge a support ticket with us and we will provide you with more information.

Authorised Account Contacts

Under our customer privacy & security policies, we cannot act on or provide any information or support to any person not listed on a customers account. This is to protect both you and Hightek Hosting.

Therefore, if you are a customer of Hightek Hosting who maintains a number of contact persons who are authorised to act on your behalf, such as web developers, account managers, support technicians etc, it is important that you add those relevant people to the contacts area of your MyAccount Portal.

Should anyone contact Hightek Hosting regarding your account, either seeking technical support, billing advise or any account information, be it by support ticket, live chat, phone or any of the methods of contact provided by Hightek Hosting, they will unfortunately be refused contact and advised accordingly.

All too often these issues are raised with Hightek Hosting, and they cause frustrations to all parties involved. Therefore to ensure correct support is provided at the time you need it most, ensure that all your contacts list is up to date and that the relevant people requiring assistance are added to this list.

Adding Account Contacts/Authorised Representatives

In order to add additional contact persons to your account, the process is quite simple:

1. Login to the MyAccount Portal at https://www.hightekhosting.com.au/myaccount/
2. Select "My Details" from the top navigation menu
3. Select "Add New Contact" from the navigation menu
4. Add the appropriate contact details of the person who is authorised to contact us and select which information they are allowed to receive communications on and act on behalf of
5. Click "Save Changes" to add the contact person

If you wish to then change the default billing contact to someone you have added to the authorised list (such as if you are a web developer who has setup the account and wish to send the invoices to the actual company in question) then you simply need to go back into the "My Details" area once you have added the contact person and change the "Default Billing Contact" to that particular person in charge of the companies billing and payments.

It is important to ensure you have accurate contact information and authorised personel on your account as if someone does contact us to discuss your account, we will not communicate any information regarding your account with them under any circumstances. We make no exceptions on our customer security policy.

Live Chat Support

Although we do provide Live Chat support, there are times of which we cannot accurately or securely identify the person/contact on the other end of the conversation.

All too often, we receive the comments "But the account owner is sitting right next to me" or "they have said I can speak to you".

Unfortunately, we have no real secure way of identifying that fact, so if you are refused technical support via our Live Chat, we ask that you please follow the instructions outlined by the support technician to ensure that secure and accurate support is provided.

If we decline to offer support via Live Chat, it's not because we don't want to offer support; it's because we want to ensure the security and integrity of your account is maintained, so please do not be offended.

Accurate Account Contact Information

All too often we hear the "I've recently moved or changed my contact email, so I didn't get your invoice".

Please be aware that it is your responsibility to ensure that your contact details are always correct as all invoices are issued via email as well as ticket responses and other important service information, such as scheduled outage notices, service advisories and more.

Failing to keep this information up-to-date can have many negative effects on your business with us as well as your service and we'd much prefer to always be able to communicate with you.

Please also be aware that it is against the law to provide invalid, incorrect or false information and it is constituted as an act of fraud.

In the past, we have had a number of customers provided false information in the hope of obtaining an account, with no intentions of making payment of the account in future, requesting a chargeback or refund from our payment gateway providers or to simply be a burden to our services.

We wish to make you aware that we screen orders on a random basis and should any of your account contact details be found to be invalid, false or fraudulent or incorrect, you will be asked to correct them immediately.

Failure to provide correct contact information once we have requested will result in your order being rejected and accounts terminated without question.

Server Connectivity

Hightek Hosting will be able to perform the following tests to ensure that your service is functioning properly:

• Industry standard PING test to the IP and Domain address of the site
• Industry standard TRACEROUTE to the IP and domain address of the site
• Log onto the server to verify that the proper software and system resources are available by insuring that the resource allocations are preforming within acceptable ranges
• Log onto the server to verify the integrity of the virtual webs by insuring that the virtual website is running and the mapped in accordance with a working website

Hightek Hosting cannot be held responsible for issues that cannot be re-created by our technical support specialists, including non Hightek Hosting routing issues, non Hightek Hosting DNS server issues and ISP connectivity.

Domain Name Issues

Hightek Hosting will be able to perform the following tests for services related to domain support:

• Query Hightek's own domain name servers to verify the correct entries existing for your domain
• Use appropriate WHOIS tools to verify and query that the customers domain name servers are pointed to the correct DNS servers
• Verify that a domain transfer request has been sent to the appropriate registrar and contact email

Changes to domain contact information with third party registrars are to be performed by the customer prior to filing a domain transfer request with Hightek Hosting

Hightek Hosting cannot be held responsible for issues pertaining to internet propagation.

Email/Webmail

Hightek Hosting will be able to perform the following tests to ensure your sites mail services are functioning properly:

• Connect with a browser to the webmail interface available for your domain
• Use a browser to send and receive email from the webmail interface for your domain
• Use an email client to test connectivity to the mailserver for your service
• Use an email client to send and receive emails from the mailserver for your service

Hightek Hosting will be unable to resolve issues that cannot be recreated by our technical support technicians. Hightek Hosting will also be unable to resolve issues relating to domain propagation or from the use of third-party mail applications such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Apple Mail and Eudora.

MySQL/MS-SQL Database Server

Hightek Hosting offers the following SQL support:

• Verify that the administrative/root/reseller account can connect to the MySQL/MS-SQL server and create databases, users and modify passwords
• Verify that the database server is online and running.

Further information can be found in our Terms of Service

If you require any further information about our support, please feel free to Contact Us