Getting help


sandrThe following conversation plays out in our inbox and Live Chat a good few times a week.

In fact, you may have received a link to this post from one of those places.

If so, then the dialog below could be an easy way for you to better understand your situation and to get the quickest resolution to your problem…

“Is there a problem in $datacentername?”

There might be.  There are lots of servers and switches in each of the data centers we use.

A better opener might be something like “When I go to $someurl it says $something and instead it should be loading $suchandsuchapage”.

Let us know:

  • what you are doing (URL you are on, command you are running, …),
  • what you are seeing, and
  • what you expect to see.

The first two things help us reproduce your problem and the last helps us know when we have fixed it.

We post notices of issues at https://rimuhosting.com/maintenance.jsp  So that can often be handy to check.

“Help, my website is down.  Fix it!”

We can take a quick look in Live Chat.  Else email us.  Or pop in a support ticket.

PS: Do let us know the affected domain.  That lets us figure out which customer account is involved.

“I don’t have a login to your website, but you guys are hosting my website.  Help me!”

Many of our customers provide reseller type services.  They are designers or webhosts who use our servers to host websites.  The person with the login to our control panel is our customer.

If you don’t have that login, then you are likely not our direct customer.  So you would need to contact our direct customer (your service provider) have them assist you (you are their customer).

“But it’s urgent!  Help me!”

Email us some details.  We will forward that info along to our customer.  In some cases (where there is an obvious issue with an obvious fix) we can improve things and follow up with our customer on the actions we took.

“I never heard back from you.”

We send our responses to our customer.  You can follow up with them.

“I don’t have your customer’s contact details.  Give them to me.”

No.  We need to respect our customer’s privacy.

Are you sure you do not have their contact details?  If they are providing you a service (like hosting or DNS) there is already probably some direct contact between you and our customer.

“Really, I have no clue who your customer is.  Tell me!”

No.  But you can sometimes figure out the contact details from public information.  e.g. from http://whois.domaintools.com/ or from DNS information like http://zonomi.com/zoneinfo.jsp

“What can I do to sort this out myself?”

You can host your website for yourself.  If you wish to be a direct customer of RimuHosting you can sign up at http://launchtimevps.com.  In most cases the most preferable option for everyone involved is for you to work things out with our customer directly.  And we can help sort out issues on their instructions.

“Give me my website files and database!”

No.  You would need to contact our customer and have them instruct us on that.

“But they are climbing Mt Everest/Not responding to emails/Unhappy I haven’t paid for my hosting”

If you have your own backups you can use those.  (Note there appears to be an inverse correlation between needing and having backups)

“You guys are controlling my DNS and I need you to make a change”

You should have our customer do that for you.

“We can’t get your customer to make that DNS change!”

If you own the domain name then you should have an account at the registrar, where you  bought the domain.  You can use that to set the name servers you use.  When you control the name servers you can control the DNS/IP lookup for your website.  If you need DNS hosting we can provide that to you at http://zonomi.com

“But I’m paying for this server”

If we are billing you in some way (e.g. you have a paypal subscription in place or we hold your credit card), email us with some details of the situation.  We will get you to provide some information to verify your identity.  And we are able to delete your CC from our system or cancel paypal subscriptions or sometimes update details on your behalf.

Rescue image: wikipedia