No queue you cannot see, no ticket you have to open before anyone will speak to you, and no support plan you have to buy first. The telephone below is answered by a person around the clock, and it is the same number the service level agreement names for reporting failed hardware — which is why calling it is what starts the replacement clock.
Six things account for most of what arrives at this desk. Each one says what it usually really is, and who can fix it — because half of them you can fix faster than we can, and knowing which half is the whole difference between a five-minute outage and a two-hour one.
Nearly always a firewall rule, a changed SSH port, or fail2ban having banned the address you are calling from. The machine is usually running perfectly and simply refusing you specifically.
The KVM console reaches the machine without the network stack, so it works when SSH does not.
Read errors in dmesg, an array that will not assemble, or a machine that has dropped to read-only. This is ours, and it is the one the service level agreement puts a clock on.
Usually a stale session on the management controller rather than a dead one. Every dedicated server ships with its own controller — iLO, iDRAC, a BMC or a Moonshot chassis manager — and it answers when the operating system does not.
A bad kernel, a botched upgrade, or a machine you would simply rather start clean. Reinstalls are unlimited, need no ticket and no permission, and thirty-three images install in one click — thirty-two of them free.
The receiving side wants the PTR record to match the name your server introduces itself as. You set both yourself, and the change is live in minutes rather than in a ticket queue.
A complaint arrived and the port was closed. The support desk cannot lift it — only the abuse queue can, and only once the complaint is answered. Telling us quickly what you have changed is what makes it short.
The fastest support request is the one nobody had to send. All of this is in your dashboard, available on every plan including the free ones, and none of it costs a ticket or waits on anybody being awake.
Everything above is included on every plan and is never metered — the telephone, the chat, the tickets, the email, the console, the reinstalls. What a paid tier buys is time: how fast we answer, how fast a failed part is replaced, and whether the machine is monitored when it goes quiet at three in the morning.
| Plan | We answer within | Failed part replaced | Advanced support | Monitored | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic24x7x12 | 12h | 24h | — | — | Included |
| Bronze24x7x4 | 4h | 4h | 30m | 5m | $19 |
| Silver24x7x2 | 2h | 3h | 60m | 2m | $39 |
| Gold24x7x1 | 1h | 2h | 90m | 1m | $69 |
| Platinum24x7x1/2 | 30m | 2h | 120m | 30s | $99 |
The last column is the one that changes an ordinary month. We read the switch port your server is plugged into rather than pinging the machine, so a firewall cannot hide an outage from us; when the port goes quiet you get an email. From Silver up, a heartbeat you install on the server with one line also catches an operating system that freezes while its port is still up. On Gold and Platinum we open the ticket ourselves rather than waiting to be asked, and on Platinum an automatic investigation starts the moment an outage is confirmed — and restarts a frozen server only if you have allowed it.
The tier above is what you buy. This is what you are owed when we do not deliver it, out of the signed service level agreement rather than out of a brochure. The replacement window is your tier’s — 24 hours on Basic, 4 on Bronze, 3 on Silver, 2 on Gold and Platinum — and the credit is measured from the moment we are past it. Pick your plan and drag the hours to see it.
Your plan, and how long a failed part stayed failed…
An illustration of the published schedule, not a quotation. The ladder below is the schedule itself.
Percentages of the monthly recurring charge for the affected service, by how far past your window the replacement ran. The clock starts when you tell us, by telephone or live chat — which is why the number is at the top of this page and not behind a login — and the window is the one your tier carries, so a Gold customer is owed the first band two hours in where a Basic customer is owed it after twenty-four.
More than fifteen consecutive minutes of network unavailability earns one day of credit for every cumulative hour of it in that calendar month, and part hours count proportionally once the month has passed an hour in total. The cap is one month: we cannot owe you more than you paid.
Within seven business days of the end of the month, tell us three things: who you are, the date with the start and end time, and a sentence on what it looked like. You get an answer by email either way, and approved credit lands on the next invoice.
Two things void it, and both are in the agreement: not giving us the access needed to troubleshoot properly, and an account that is not in good financial standing. Credit is set against what you owe and is never paid out as cash.
Whatever channel you use, the first message decides whether the answer is a fix or a question. These four things are what we would otherwise have to ask you for, and asking costs a round trip at the worst possible moment.
Which machine. The server ID or its main IP address. An account name is ambiguous the moment you rent a second one.
What you see, quoted exactly. The error as it is written, not as it is remembered. “Connection refused” and “connection timed out” are two different faults with two different causes.
When it started, and what changed just before. A kernel upgrade, a firewall rule, a new deployment. The honest answer “nothing, as far as I know” is useful too.
What you already tried. So we do not spend the first twenty minutes repeating it.
Every host has a line, and most of them find out where it is halfway through your problem. Ours is written down so you can plan around it instead of discovering it — and it is a line about the machine, not about how much you pay.
We will always look, and we will tell you what we can see. What we will not do is spend a night inside software we did not write while calling it hardware support. If you want somebody inside your own stack rather than beside it, that is a managed service — server management is the page for it.
Before you write anything, this is the order we would check it in — and you can run every step yourself, against our own edge rather than a third party's description of it.
If your plan includes monitoring, the server's page in your dashboard says whether we can still see it on the network, and when we last looked.
The looking glass runs ping, traceroute, MTR and BGP from New York and Bucharest, so you can see the path from our side as well as yours.
We announce our own address space under AS19624, so the looking glass is looking at our edge and not a transit provider's guess at it.
Open the console. If the machine answers there but not on the network, it is a firewall or a route; if it does not answer there either, it is hardware and it is ours.
The part of the desk that never sleeps and never has a queue. Server-side first, because the most-read article in this whole tree is the one about SSH keys — then encoder by encoder, with the settings that actually matter.
