A Website Outage

A Website Outage

It is important that you are prepared for an emergency before it happens. We recommend that you read this before an outage happens because in an outage this may not be accessible and Zeald support may not be easily reached. You might also like to print a copy and keep it handy.

If your website is down

If you are not able to access your website, and you have checked your internet connection is working, then it is time to call us. Please make sure that you have the error message handy for our support team.

During office hours

Call us: NZ - 0508 932 748 AUS - 1800 224 032

Try our Live chat: Bottom right hand corner in Website Manager

After hours

Speak to the after-hours answer service. Reporting an outage after hours does not incur extra fees.

After-hours emergency support: 026113320

Free phone number 0508 932 748 ext 9

Outside NZ call +64 9 415 7575 ext 9

If you are not able to get through, chances are many other clients are also contacting us and all our support lines are jammed.

If this is the case we have a number of systems in place...

Check our System Status

If there is a serious issue with our servers we will post any updates to this page. If you would like us to notify you of any outages when they happen you should subscribe to our System Status blog to Receive updates by Email

If we are experiencing a serious outage, our own websites may also be down, including our online help.

Check our Facebook Page

You can check our Facebook page facebook.com/zeald. It's easy to find and it is hopefully very reliable. Please note that you do not need to have a Facebook account or follow us, it is a public page and anybody can access it. If you would like to post a question to us, you will need to be signed in an account. If you would like to receive wall notifications, you should follow our page.

We will post all our updates to our Facebook page as they come to hand. We will actively monitor our Facebook feed during the outage and answer any queries you may have. You can also follow us on Twitter, but keep in mind that Facebook is our primary method of communication on social media.

We take outages very seriously

Firstly we do our very best to avoid serious outages and are continually working to ensure our website reliability. Unfortunately outages do happen and sometimes they are out of our control.

We have a reliable alert system in place that advises our technicians when a server is slowing, or shuts down. In most cases we will already know about a problem and will be working on the resolution before you call us.

Outage Communication

Our servers are carefully monitored and managed by our server hosting company Umbrellar. All outages and server performance issues are alerted to Zeald as soon as they happen. Our Products and Infrastructure (P&I) team look into these issues as they occur and work with Umbrellar to have them resolved as quickly as possible.

Many Zeald clients call in and report issues or outages, usually as soon as they occur. There are numerous issues that our team are alerted to every day. These can be things like a domain name hosting not being paid or even just the client internet connection being down. In most cases outages only affect a handful of clients, if that.

When an outage occurs of a certain size, the P&I manager sends notification to the wider Zeald management team. The P&I team do not send notification for every outage. Outages usually only affect a small portion of websites for a short period of time. The P&I team focus all their time and resources on understanding and fixing the issue. Finding out affected clients and notifying them distracts and delays the fix. For these minor outages, it makes sense to concentrate all of our time and effort on fixing the issue and getting the website backup and running.

We have found that if we notify everyone of every outage, this creates panic and undue frustration, especially those whose websites were unaffected. Then when there really is an issue that affects them they ignore it. It becomes a 'boy who cried wolf' scenario.

Notification for large scale outages is passed on to the client care team and account managers while team coordinators and the support team are updated. The client care team provide updates to customers as they call in. Clients who request updates are logged in a list for proactive notification.

Updates on major outages are also communicated via social media, as detailed previously.

Ongoing Updates

The P&I team focus all their attention and resource on resolving the issue as quickly as possible. Updates are provided once the Products and Infrastructure team have new information or have uncovered and fixed the issue. These updates are posted as soon as possible to the system status page and to Facebook as they are received, and we direct clients to these centralised communications. We will do our best to provide updates at least every hour.

When an outage has been resolved we will often wait for a period to ensure it is stable before officially notifying clients. Our account management and support teams are notified when large widespread issues are fixed.