Scope of SiteGround's Technical Support

Support Channels

We provide support coverage to our customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including all holidays and weekends. Our system automatically sorts your inquiry and suggests the most adequate channel or channels for assistance – live chat, phone, or ticket, based on the availability and hold times on each channel and the respective teams’ expertise to address your issue with the aim to minimize the problem resolution time.

Support Coverage

Hosting platform availability

Our most essential responsibility is to make sure our platform is up and running so that your website is always accessible. That is why when you experience any service downtime, we handle your request with the highest priority. In case our servers and services are up, but your website is down, we may or may not be able to assist depending on the nature of the problem. We will troubleshoot the reported issue and if it is caused by a service or server configuration, we will do our best to resolve it as long as that does not affect the service for other clients. In case there is no server or service issue causing the problem, but your website is not functioning as expected, we will point you to the best way to resolve it since problems directly related to the website itself are not part of our support scope. Examples of such unrelated items include code resulting in errors, conflicts between different system modules, incorrect content, custom site settings resulting in problems, and others.

We make sure that all essential server software, client interfaces, and protocols that allow you to interact with our platform and your hosting account such as Apache, PHP, NGINX, FTP, SFTP, SSH, HTTP/2, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, TCP, UDP, Client Area, Site Tools, and other are available and we handle issues related to their normal functioning and settings.

Access to SiteGround Account

Naturally, all issues associated with accessing your Client area and control panel will be handled with high priority. Ownership disputes or problems arising from your inability to access the owner’s email trigger strict procedures that aim to protect the integrity of the data stored in the account and may take longer to be resolved since they may require the expertise of several departments such as Customer Care, Legal, and Billing, some of which operate only within regular business hours. Please note that in cases of ownership dispute when after a thorough investigation it turns out that more than one party has a valid claim on the account as per our Terms of Service, the resolution may happen to be outside our expertise and scope of support.

Domains

We help you set up your domains to work with our platform and your website by assisting you in case you experience problems related to:

• Registering or renewing domain names through SiteGround
• Transferring domain names to SiteGround
• Parking domains and creating subdomains
• Setting up email accounts with your domain names
• Managing domain names’ records
• Updating domain name contact information for domains registered through SiteGround
• Creating or editing DNS zone files
• Domain mapping
• Domain redirection

We do not support requests concerning advanced customizations or setup/modifications of third-party services such as:

• Modifying zone files to work with non-SiteGround products
• Configuring advanced zone files
• Troubleshooting third-party DNS zone file records

Email Service

We offer complimentary email services and we assist you when you experience problems with:

• Sending and receiving email
• Creating and deleting email accounts, including catch-all accounts
• Setting up MX, SPF, TXT, SRV records for your email
• Setting up email forwarders and autoresponders
• Setting up IMAP and POP3 protocols for your email account, clients, apps, or scripts
• Spam Experts settings to control spam

We cannot efficiently and adequately assist you with the following:

• Setup or troubleshooting of third-party email clients
• Troubleshooting network connections
• Composing email messages
• Creating email folders in your local mail clients
• Importing and exporting .pst/.olm files

Managed WordPress

SiteGround offers managed WordPress service, which includes automated installation of WordPress and automatic updates of the WordPress core and free plugins. As part of that service, we also provide basic troubleshooting of WordPress misconfiguration and features, and help ensure that WordPress and its features work correctly in our environment.

Regarding third-party plugins and themes, we help identify issues that occur on the server-side and analyze logs and other errors that could be helpful in addressing them. In some cases, we collaborate with plugin and theme developers to identify and resolve issues caused by a conflict between their software and our infrastructure.

General issues with the WordPress core codebase are outside our scope of support. Issues with plugin/theme functionality; conflicts between plugins, themes, and other parts of the website; misbehavior of custom code and other WordPress problems not related to our servers’ configurations are outside of our scope of support. In most of these cases, we strongly advise reaching out to a developer, the software provider, or the author to help with these elements of your site.

Database Management

We offer tools for database management and we will assist you if you encounter problems using those tools. We cannot assist you with slow MySQL queries, large databases, and tables, broken tables, database optimization, or other management as these services require the specialized attention of a web developer.

Website Performance

We ensure that all our services are performing in the best possible way for optimal website performance. However, assisting with performance issues of a particular site caused by slow PHP code or SQL queries that require optimization and development work is outside the scope of our support. In such cases we recommend you to contact a web developer with experience in performance optimization. Our team may give you suggestions and tips, if applicable, including the use of our performance plugins, CDN integration, or other out-of-the-box solutions available on our platform.

Security And Hacked Accounts

In case there is a problem arising from our maintenance of the server security such as exploits in the Apache, PHP, MySQL, or other server software, we take care to fix and resolve the issue until we restore your site to its normal functioning. However, accounts and websites hacked due to weak or leaked passwords, old website software, malware, or others that are under the full control of the account owner are not catered to. We advise you to restore from backup, contact malware cleanup professionals and start running regular malware audits.

Other Unique Features

We provide a large number of complementary tools and services. In case you experience problems with these services, SiteGround will resolve the technical issues impeding their usage. We will offer support related to settings and proper usage of these tools and features. The list of services include:

• SiteGround Backup creation services and restore tool
• SiteGround Supercacher
• CMS installer
• Automatic WordPress updates
• SSL certificates
• PHP versions manager
• Staging
• Git Push
• Speed Optimizer plugin
• WordPress Starter plugin
• WordPress Migrator plugin

Outside Our Scope Of Support

The following services are outside the scope of our support:

• Site design issues, customization or coding
• Web development and customization
• Writing or debugging custom code
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• User management
• Database management or assisting with SQL queries
• Issues related to the installation, functionality, or bugs of third-party scripts/applications not provided by SiteGround, including third-party extensions and themes;
• Issues related to your web design;
• Benchmark tests;
• Certain changes in the setup of your servers may not be applicable based on the plan type;
• Website security audits and malicious code clean-up issues

Excess Usage

Our system keeps track of all your support inquiries and calculates statistical averages. In case it detects an exceedingly high usage compared to the averages of similarly situated customers for the same period, it may streamline your support interactions with the purpose of improving the quality and efficiency of the support delivered.

Paid Support

For some technical support requests, which are outside our free technical support scope, we may be able to offer a paid support service. We will inform you about that and will ask for your consent before performing the service and charging you for it.