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Copyright © 2016 - 2026 SiteDistrict, All Rights ReservedWhen something goes wrong with your site, it can be annoying and often stressful - especially if it affects your business. While our goal at SiteDistrict is to prevent as many issues from happening in the first place, there will always be some cases where this can't be achieved. In such cases, our support is here to work through the issues and hopefully, provide a satisfying resolution, and whenever possible, ensure similar problems don't come up again.
First, some basics about support, before getting into the specifics unique to SiteDistrict.
We define support as: any communication or action from our staff in response to contact from our customers, as well as proactive actions & communication from us, in response to activity by you, your users, or with your sites.
In other words: if you talk to us, or we reach out to you, that constitutes "support".
This can be a tough question to answer. Typically, you would contact support if you have a problem that needs to be solved, you have a question, something isn't working, or some combination of these.
The most important thing to consider when deciding whether to contact support, is who to contact.
WordPress sites involve many things, including a domain, DNS, possibly the Cloudflare proxy, the hosting, the WordPress site itself (plugins, theme, custom PHP code, etc.), outbound email, and more. Being able to access your site and our dashboard also depends on things like your device, network connection, and ISP.
First, think about why you want to contact support, and then think about which of these things listed above are most likely involved. In some cases, you might not know, and might need to guess. Narrow it down to which services are involved, and make sure you've got the right contact points for each service.
In some cases, searching the Internet (Google, Bing), or using an AI chat assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, etc.) might make more sense than contacting support directly, at least at first. Be careful of Artificial Intelligence (AI) results though; the results are often filled with errors, many of which you might not be able to identify.
Regardless of which service is involved, consider checking the documentation, dashboard, and the tools available to you first, to see if you might be able to answer the question yourself. While you might already be feeling stuck by the time you think about contacting support, some of our self-service tips might help you think of something you missed or forgot.
Finally, if you're still requiring assistance, don't hesitate to contact either SiteDistrict or the other services involved. However, before you do, make sure you review and agree to our Support Policy below.
Once you decided to contact someone for support, you're more likely to get good results if you follow some basic principles and steps.
See our page on How to Get Good Support for some valuable guidance.
It's important to understand the SiteDistrict philosophy before engaging our support. This will help you to understand our responses and questions.
SiteDistrict's philosophy on WordPress hosting can be stated as follows:
Anything that can be done better at the hosting level, and that will benefit a majority of WordPress sites that we host, should be done at the hosting level, instead of via a plugin or service.
In addition, our policy is this:
At SiteDistrict, we endeavor to prevent as many issues as possible, including issues common at other hosting providers. Whenever possible, we will automate or solve a problem directly with our system, rather than providing instructions on how you should do it yourself. Ideally, problems are addressed once and for all, for all customers, so that they don't come up again.
Our platform is easily one of the most powerful, highest performing, and feature-rich managed WordPress hosting solutions on the market. Many, if not most, of the features that so many of our customers love, have been inspired by direct interaction with customers, in the process of providing support.
Unlike many hosting providers, we view support as an opportunity and an investment, both in our customers, and in improving our platform, rather than as a cost to be minimized.
Keeping in mind our philosophy above, and the section on When to Contact Support above, you probably already have much of the answer to this question.
More specifically, we provide support for the SiteDistrict platform, and limited support with debugging site-specific issues with plugins, themes, and third-party services.
In terms of our platform, we provide direct support for issues involving dashboard functionality & features, platform bugs, performance, security & our firewall, and our marketing website & documentation.
While we do not directly support third-party plugins & services, if one of these is causing your site(s) to be unavailable or unusable, we can sometimes provide assistance in diagnosing and even fixing the issue, or instruct you on how to use our dashboard and platform to diagnose the issue yourself.
Some things that we generally don't support:
In some cases, it's difficult to determine if an issue is something that we provide support for. In such cases, just go ahead and contact us and ask.
At SiteDistrict, our founder Matt pretty much does everything, including handling support. This means you will always be talking to the same person. We don't use AI chatbots for support.
Obviously, this also means we don't have support tiers. There is no need to escalate a support issue, attempt to talk to a different person, or wait for someone more technical.
By speaking with Matt, you are also talking directly to the person who will both help you diagnose your problem, and - if it involves a change or fix with SiteDistrict - the person who will solve it for you.
This section defines our support policy, including who can contact and receive support, and the expectations involved with obtaining support. It's written in the first person, as Matt currently provides all support.
Most importantly, SiteDistrict support is not included with your hosting fees.
The monthly amount that you pay each month does not entitle you to receive any support.
While I will always do my best to keep our platform online, secure, and free of major issues, any personalized interactions require an additional investment and commitment.
Instead of providing support for "free", and instead of charging an extra fee for it, I require and expect a "mutual investment" of time and effort.
I ask that in order to receive support, you give me one of your most valuable assets: your time & respect. I will endeavor to be generous with mine in return.
When you contact support, you agree that you will collaborate, answer questions that are asked of you, perform tasks that are requested (to the best of your ability), and invest your own time and effort to learn and understand, as we work together to resolve the problem or answer your question.
In return, I will strive to address your questions and issues accurately, completely, and in a timely fashion.
This approach lets us eliminate low-level and "cheap" support staff, which most customers don't like anyway, and instead provide empathetic, expert-level, invested, thorough - and, hopefully - enjoyable support, at no additional monetary cost.
When you contact us for support, do not just say "Hello" and wait for a response.
It's fine to "Hi!", but at the same time, let me know why you are reaching out. Provide some context and background. Avoid asking directly for something, but rather, define the problem first. Provide screenshots if you have them. Provide links to the website or our dashboard where I can reproduce the issue, if possible. Let me know what changes have been made to the website (if any), which could be related. Let me know exactly when the problem started or was first noticed.
If you don't provide context or define the problem, I'll likely ask you to back up and do so.
Keeping in mind the SiteDistrict philosophy, I'll want to understand what's going on, and why the issue is happening at all. You might not be thinking about it, but I'll likely be trying to figure out how we can ensure that others don't end up having the same problem.
I will typically ask "Why?" a lot during conversations, and I'm a big fan of the Five Whys approach. I find that the better I understand the context, situation, and customer needs, the better I can address the problem.
For even more information about how to have a productive support conversation, see our page on How to Get Good Support.
I don't like to repeat myself, if I can avoid it. If something comes up where I believe I've already answered you before, I will likely refer you back to the previous email, conversation, or message. You are expected to go find and review these messages. Please do the same for me, if I need to reference a previous message or conversation.
My support and messages can sometimes be blunt, and unfortunately the tone can sometimes be misread. No offense is intended. Sometimes I'm in a hurry.
I enjoy humor, and try to have a sense of humor about most things. I'll share my opinion about things, based on my expertise, if I feel it is relevant and/or helpful. I try to avoid negativity, but if I'm negative about something, it's typically for a good reason, and I'm trying to teach you something based on experience.
Though I am very careful not to make statements which I have not verified, I am sometimes wrong, and I definitely make mistakes. I do my best to admit when I am wrong, and apologize. I expect you to do the same.
I don't expect you to be a technical expert about anything in particular, but I do expect you to learn, and over time, become more knowledgeable and self-sufficient. I'm constantly learning as well, and in future conversations I'll share any new and relevant information I've learned since the last time.
I hate unsolved mysteries, and I'll typically dig much deeper into issues than most support staff at other companies. I may look at something quickly at first, but come back to you later after I've had a chance to look at it more closely.
Support is provided on a first-name basis. I want to know immediately who I am talking to. I remember people and our interactions, and over time, I will get a feel for your level of expertise and your communication style.
If using our Get Support dialog, or our live chat widget, you must be logged in to SiteDistrict as your own user, with your first and last name set, and a personal email address. Sharing personal logins to SiteDistrict is not allowed.
If you contact us from a "generic" user account, we will ask you to login as a new user or have one created for you by the account Owner. Thank you for your understanding with this.
If you contact us for support, I may speak to others about the issue in order to provide what I feel is the best support possible. In most cases, I will not identify you or your website directly, unless I feel it is necessary or beneficial.
I may choose to contact others on your SiteDistrict account who are listed under the Account -> Users page. In some rare cases, I may contact someone who shows up as a WordPress user on your sites.
For issues or problems that we detect, I may pro-actively reach out to you or others on your SiteDistrict account.
How quickly I respond to a support request depends on many things. It can range from within a few seconds, to a day or two later, though the latter is rare. I attempt to respond to most support requests within 24 hours.
An important note: Only use one message channel at a time. Do NOT send us multiple messages via different channels, if we don't respond quickly enough for you.
Only after 24 hours (or 1 hours minimum, for "urgent" issues - be careful about defining what is "urgent"), should you send a follow-up message, referencing your original message.
Many of our customers are thoughtful and considerate, and tell me upfront when an issue is not urgent to them. I definitely appreciate this. Every once in a while though, I'll take this a bit too seriously, and let something fall off my radar. Please do ping me and remind me if it seems I might have forgotten your request.
One important requirement is to not leave topics hanging. If you solve a problem on your own after contacting us, follow-up and let me know what happened and what the solution was. If I ask you a question even after an issue is resolved, make sure to address it and not leave it hanging. If I've invested the time to reply to your initial support request, please make sure to follow-up and close the loop.
In some cases, to continue receiving support, you may need to go back and respond to previous threads that were left hanging.
If I neglect to answer a question or address an issue, please do remind me and ask again. I strive to answer and address all questions and important points, but in some cases I'll miss something.
As a one-person shop, keeping things organized is critical to providing high-quality and efficient support, and to staying sane overall.
When contacting us for support, limit each email / Slack thread / Intercom chat to one topic or issue, whenever possible. This makes it easier for me to keep track of all the many concurrent support topics & tasks that I might be dealing with at once.
If you include multiple seemingly-unrelated issues or questions in a support request, I may ask you to split them up (into Slack threads, separate emails), or I might do so myself.
Trust is very important when it comes to support. In fact, it's the foundation upon which excellent support rests.
When you trust us, and you feel that we have got your back, you're more likely to report issues promptly because you can trust you will be heard and that they will be addressed. You are not afraid to ask if an issue is a problem with SiteDistrict, because you know I will answer honestly. You will feel that if it is an issue which I need to address, I will do my best to take care of it or provide an alternative resolution.
When customers view us as the problem, because something doesn't happen somewhere else or with another hosting provider, or for another reason, that's an indication that trust is lacking. If how you see something doesn't match with what we are claiming, it doesn't necessarily mean either of us is wrong. Sometimes thing don't match up cleanly and easily, and it takes some extra effort to come to an understanding.
Trust leads to easier contact, quicker sharing, more pleasant & mutually beneficial interaction, and an inclination to communicate openly and provide details freely.
Some of our customers host all their WordPress sites on SiteDistrict, some host a few and typically move other sites over steadily, and some host sites both on SiteDistrict as well as other hosts, for various reasons. Occasionally, a customer will move a minority of sites off SiteDistrict, while keeping others with us.
As part of our support policy, we require customers to be open & honest about their hosting decisions. We also require that you tell us in advance - at least when possible - when and why you are migrating a site off of SiteDistrict.
This again, is all about trust. When someone moves a site off SiteDistrict without letting us know, especially after we've established a relationship and communication, is a strong sign that trust has been lost. Without trust, communication becomes tense, misinterpretation becomes common, blame takes over, and so on. One of the strongest signals that our relationship is still intact is if a customer tells us ahead of time about moving a site, or shortly after, and also apologizes for not telling us advance.
For anyone that says or thinks, "It's none of your business," we disagree. WordPress hosting is our business. We want to understand why people are choosing to host their sites on various hosts, to ensure our platform remains an excellent fit for the customers and sites which remain, and those which might come in the future. So, while you can choose not to share or be forthcoming, understand that also means I will no longer provide support.
You are responsible as a team. All your team members must follow this support policy for any to receive support.
If anyone one on your team is unable or unwilling to follow this policy, they must refrain from contacting us directly.
If someone from your team, or a developer that you've hired, does not follow this policy, and we notify you of the problem, you must speak with them about this, and then provide us with a summary of the end result, your honest assessment of the situation, and a summary of how you plan to prevent future issues.
We have a ridiculous amount of monitoring covering the SiteDistrict platform, and I will typically know about any significant problems before or as soon as any of our customers. It's fine and encouraged to message me if you notice something wrong, but keep in mind that if it looks like something affecting multiple sites or the entire platform, and is indeed a real "emergency", then I'm probably going to be getting a lot of messages at once. I'll do my best to respond, though the response might be slightly delayed or brief.
For everything else, I triage support requests and issues just like anything else, and I will judge the urgency myself and attempt to address the most urgent issues ASAP. One very important thing to keep in mind is this: if you can or should actually solve the problem yourself, it's not as urgent as something that actually requires my interaction. Keep this in mind when submitting support cases and waiting for responses.
While I am limited by how much I can do myself, the benefit is that you don't need to submit multiple support tickets or wait for issues to be escalated. At many other hosting providers, even those with 24-hour support, the time it takes to get a proper response AND resolution - even to urgent issues - is often much longer than it takes at SiteDistrict.
Overall, customers seem to be extremely pleased with my response times, and I repeatedly receive praise for how quickly I address issues. For customers that are on good terms and follow this support policy, I will address your needs as quickly and as best as I can.
There is a lot going on with SiteDistrict, all the time. There is constant human traffic to sites, crawling by search engines, hacking attempts & unwanted traffic, site errors, noisy but typically harmless PHP warnings filling up error logs, unfixed SiteDistrict platform bugs, undiscovered SiteDistrict platform bugs, and more.
While I do my best to pro-actively detect and address more significant issues, there are often things happening on sites that don't seem "quite right", but I won't address them unless I hear about them from the customer or a site visitor.
If something is going on with your site, and it's important to you, don't necessarily assume it will be fixed. Contact us if in doubt or if you want me to look at something sooner than later.
As they say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Don't be surprised if you contact me expecting me to do something just because you ask, and I instead start asking for context and reasoning. Be polite, patient, and expect most interactions to take some time. If you think it's something that can be done quickly, then there's also a decent chance that you can do it on your own, even if you don't know how or realize it.
When you contact us for support, you can expect several things. These include:
There are many ways to communicate with us for support. Use only one channel per issue, please.
When logged in to the SiteDistrict dashboard, most users will have a small teal & white chat bubble at the bottom right of their screen. Click on this to start a chat conversation.
We currently use Intercom for our live chat.
You can email us at support@sitedistrict.com for support via email.
Many of our customers who have multiple sites, or whom we speak to frequently, communicate with us using Slack.
SiteDistrict has a paid Slack workspace, allowing us to add limited guest users to single channels for no extra charge. We can also use Slack Connect with other organizations who also have a paid Slack workspace, to share a channel between our teams.
Let us know if you would like to use Slack for SiteDistrict support.
We have phone number on our Contact page, but these days, we're unlikely to answer it unless you've scheduled a call with us ahead of time.
You can also text us, if you wish. But most of the other channels listed in this section are preferred.
We don't use Facebook messenger, X / Twitter / Bluesky, Reddit, etc. We also don't use other ticketing & support systems.
Any public messages will either be ignored, or you'll be referred here instead.
In some cases, it's faster, easier, or even more satisfying to use some of the self-service options for solving your problems or answering your questions, rather than contacting support.
For most issues that can be reproduced inside your web browser, it's a good idea to use the browser's Developer Tools to investigate and possibly diagnose or even solve the problem.
If you can replicate an issue, open up the Developer Tools for your browser.
View JavaScript and other errors related to the page inside the Console tab.
Select the Network tab, and then reload the page or enter the URL into the address bar. You may need to check the checkboxes for Preserve Log or Disable Cache (inside Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc.) to capture everything you need, or avoid browser caching issues. Review the network requests, looking for those in red, which indicate errors. Click on a row to view the Request Headers and Response Headers.
For some types of issues, we will ask you to do exactly this, and send us screenshots.
Open up the SiteDistrict dashboard and navigate to the Site Details for your site. On the left hand side of the page, in the navigation section, you'll find the Logs link.
The Logs page for the site lets you access a number of different logs for your site, including server logs for HTTP requests (normal web traffic), PHP errors logs, external HTTP request logs, and much more. Some of the pages within the Logs page are just filters for the HTTP request logs, letting you drill down to find the exact requests involved with your issue.
We have a number of pages on our site that cover different features of our platform, some of which might answer your questions or help you solve your problem on your own. Pages covering some of our features include Backups and Restore, and Staging and Cloning. For moving a site to SiteDistrict, start with our Importing a Site page. We have pages for Moving a Site off SiteDistrict and Taking a Site Offline.
One other surprisingly effective way to solve some issues, especially when you're not 100% sure that the problem needs to be solved by someone else, is to use a technique called rubber duck debugging.
To use this technique, imagine a rubber duck is sitting in front of you, or grab a stuffed animal or similar object. Or talk to your pet. Explain the issue to them out loud, including the context, what you're trying to do, the steps you're taking, and what's happening. Assume they are a complete stranger to the problem, and you need to explain it all.
If you feel strange talking to an object, you could try talking to a friend, family member, or colleague.
Even if this doesn't result in a solution or an answer, it's a good rehearsal for when you move on to contacting support.
The support experience at SiteDistrict is pretty much guaranteed to be unlike support you receive anywhere else.
Most of our customers love our support.
Our platform provides some of the best performance, security, and features on the market for WordPress sites. Much of this is a result of numerous personal interactions with our customers, while providing support.
We are grateful for your continued business, trust, and all of our mutually beneficial interactions.