Service Specification:

Website & Database Hosting

Standard Features

All Managed WordPress Hosting & Support accounts include:

• NGINX, Apache, PHP, MySQL hosting account
• Fast, secure NZ-based servers — no less than 99.8% service availability
• Plesk Panel control panel
• Managed upgrades of all WordPress core software updates
• Daily Instant restore, full backups, 2 day retention
• Daily remote database backups, 30 day retention
• Website up-time monitoring
• Managed Firewall with Fail2Ban protection
• Automatic server-side and external (Sucuri SiteCheck) malware scanning
• SSL support ¹
• Shared IP address

Notes

¹ Add SSL support to the Starter plan for $10 / month. Denotes SSL support only. You can use self-signed certificates or purchase signed certificates from WP NET or another issuer.

Each hosting account has a prescribed disk space limit. If you exceed this limit you will need to add more disk space to your plan, or upgrade your account to a higher plan.

SMTP is configured on all servers and all applications can send email.
POP mail is disabled and there are NO email accounts included.

If your domain is registered with WP NET we can provide nameservers and DNS Zone file hosting. WP NET can manage your domains on your behalf, or you can do it yourself via a control panel.

If you already have your domain registered elsewhere, and you don’t want to transfer, you can simply point your domain’s ‘A’ record to the WP NET server to activate your website.

Many domain registrars provide zone file hosting free-of-charge. Check with your registrar. You need to be able to create zone file ‘A’ records for your domain.

If you require help with configuring your domain, please open a support ticket.

Backups

Plesk Panel Backups

These backups run daily at 12am and are retained for TWO days.

Plesk Panel automated backups run at approximately 12am every day. These backups are stored on server, outside the web root in a special Plesk repository. These are complete account level backups of all your customer account and hosting data in Plesk Panel. This includes all files, databases and server configuration data.

These backups do not count towards your total disk space allocation for your hosting account.

You can login to Plesk Panel at any time and view, download and restore your backups. You can also send Plesk Panel backups to a remote FTP server.

You are also free to run additional Plesk Panel backups yourself — however, these user-generated backups do count towards your total disk space allocation. You can download the backup, or send it to a remote FTP server and then delete it from the Plesk repository.

Database Backups

These backups run at 2am each day, are stored off-server and retained for 30 days.

Database backups are run at 2am each day. These backups are encrypted and stored off-server in a secure Amazon S3 repository, so these backups are not directly accessible by the user. To request a copy or restoration of a database backup you must open a support ticket.

Emergency Data Recovery

We take data security very seriously and we would be very disappointed to learn that any customer has lost some critical data. To this end, in addition to the Plesk Panel backups we also take complete snapshot backups of all our servers every day and store them off-server for 14 days. So, if for some reason the Plesk Panel backups are not sufficient, just open a support ticket and we should be able to restore your data from our server snapshots. A recovery fee may apply.

If you do experience some loss of critical data, please contact us immediately — beyond 14 days (30 days for databases) there will be nothing we can do to restore your data.

WordPress Core Updates

As part of our Managed WordPress hosting and support service, WP NET will test and deploy all major version* WordPress core updates on behalf of our customers.

SUMMARY

• Minor version updates installed automatically, by WordPress or WP NET
• Major version updates tested and installed by WP NET (Usually the first point release after each major release)
• You are free to update yourself at any time

Please review our WordPress Core Update Policy.

* Different types of WordPress versions

• Major version = 3.9 to 4.0 or 4.1 to 4.2
• Minor version = 4.1.0 to 4.1.1, or 4.2.2 to 4.2.3 (also referred to as a point release)

WordPress Plugin Updates

Whenever possible and practicable, WP NET will deploy WordPress plugin updates that address any known serious security vulnerability, as soon as reasonable after the plugin author releases an update.

SUMMARY

• General, non-security related plugin updates are the responsibility of the customer
• WP NET recommends that customers keep their WordPress plugins up-to-date
• Important security patches and updates for WordPress plugins will be installed by WP NET whenever possible (details in our Policy)

Please review our WordPress Plugin Update Policy.

Disallowed Plugins

Some plugins are classed as disallowed from our systems and may be removed if they are detected on our servers. We try not to play too hard and fast with these rules, and we’re open to discussion if you think we’ve got something wrong. Backup plugins are generally discouraged as these unnecessarily duplicate the backup processes we already have in place. They also take up loads of disk space as they invariably store the backups locally.

For the complete list of disallowed WordPress plugins, please see our KnowledgeBase.

WordPress Theme Updates

With the exception of known, serious security vulnerabilities, WordPress theme updates are not included as part of our Managed WordPress support service.

Due to the prevalence of sites using modified themes and other issues associated with managing WordPress themes — theme updates are not covered by the Managed WordPress service.

SUMMARY

• General, non-security related theme updates are the responsibility of the customer
• WP NET recommends that customers keep their WordPress theme(s) up-to-date
• Critical security patches and updates for WordPress themes may be installed by WP NET (details in our Policy)

Please review our WordPress Theme Update Policy.

Staging Sites

Currently we do not provide any automated system for creating and managing staging sites on our servers.

However, each hosting account does include one sub-domain and one additional MySQL database so you can host a second website such as staging.mywebsite.com. The sub-domain site is not be be used as a “live” production website.

For more information, please see our Staging Site Guide.

Account Access

All shared-hosting accounts include access to Plesk Panel control panel where you can manage your hosting account, domains, sub-domains, databases, FTP accounts, backups and more.

All shared-hosting accounts support (and require) secure FTPs file transfer. You can manage your access credentials from My WP NET or the Plesk Panel. Unsecured FTP connections are not permitted, you must use FTPs.

Git is not currently supported on our servers but we may offer this in the future.

Monitoring and Security

All WP NET Managed WordPress servers are protected by managed firewalls and we enforce strict security policies where ever possible. Complex passwords must be used throughout our systems and we regularly audit accounts. We also regularly scan and remove from our servers any plugins or files which are a known security risk.

WP NET reserves the right to remove any file or files it deems a security risk and WP NET is not responsible for any loss as a result of this removal.

Monitoring

All “live” Managed WordPress sites are automatically added to our remote domain monitoring system. Domain monitoring tests each site’s HTTP response every 5 minutes. Please note that sites with sub-domains such as test, staging, dev etc are ignored and not monitored.

If any site goes down WP NET is immediately notified. We will investigate the issue and if it can be resolved within 15 minutes, we will do so. Failing that, we will contact you to discuss further.

In addition to domain monitoring, PING tests to all Managed WordPress servers run every 60 seconds.

Malware Scanning

We regularly perform a malware scan on all Managed WordPress sites using industry standard tools and services. Our systems employ both server-side file scanner and external URL scanners. If any anomalies are reported during the scan we will contact you and discuss the best course of action.

Depending on the nature of the problem and time required to resolve it, we may be able to repair at no cost, as part of your Managed WordPress service. We will let you know before we proceed if we anticipate any additional costs.

Database Management

We regularly check and optimise your WordPress database. Upon request, we can also remove WordPress revisions, auto-drafts, comment spam and perform other optimisations.

User database management is handled by phpMyAdmin which is available via Plesk Panel.

For performance reasons, we disable WordPress revisions by default.