— all systems operational
HCWeb Hosting Centre
Support · Australian sysadmins, written record

Open a ticket.
A sysadmin replies.

No L1/L2/L3 escalation, no offshore call centre. Every ticket goes directly to the team that built and runs the platform. Below: how to reach us, what to expect, and the quick answers we give most often.

01 · Pick your path

Are you a customer or thinking about becoming one?

Existing customer

I'm already hosting with WHC

Log into the billing portal and open a ticket from there. Your account context comes through with the ticket, which helps us help you faster.

  • Faster identity verification
  • Priority queue for billing tickets
  • Full ticket history preserved
Open client portal
Pre-sales · visitor

I have a question before buying

Use live chat during AEST business hours for fast pre-sales questions, or open a ticket if your question is detailed.

  • Live chat: Mon–Fri 9am–6pm AEST
  • Tickets answered in hours, not days
  • Migration scoping, custom quotes welcome
Open a ticket
02 · Current status

Before opening a ticket, check the status.

If your site or email looks down, check here first — if a cluster is in maintenance or there's a known incident, we'll have posted about it.

All systems operational
SYD-01
Sydney hosting cluster
OK
BNE-01
Brisbane hosting cluster
OK
DNS01
Primary DNS — Sydney
OK
DNS02
Secondary DNS — Brisbane
OK
Billing
Client portal & invoicing
OK
Mail
SMTP & inbound mail routing
OK
03 · What to expect

Response times,
honestly stated.

We're a small team of sysadmins, not a giant call centre. We answer fast — but we set expectations rather than pretend we're 24/7/instant.

Live chat
Minutes

When agent is online (Mon–Fri 9am–6pm AEST)

Pre-sales tickets
Within 4 hrs

During AEST business hours

Standard support
Within 8 hrs

24/7, including weekends

Site or email down
Within 1 hr

24/7 priority for outages

04 · Quick answers

Questions we answer every day.

Try here first — most issues are one of these. If your question isn't covered or our answer doesn't solve it, open a ticket and we'll dig in.

01 How long does DNS take to propagate?
DNS changes typically propagate within 2–4 hours after you update them, though the technical maximum is 48 hours (this depends on the TTL set on the record). If you've just transferred a domain or pointed it to us, give it a few hours before troubleshooting. You can check propagation with tools like dnschecker.org.
02 Where do I log in to manage my hosting?
Two different logins for two different things. Your hosting control panel (Enhance) is where you manage sites, email, databases, SSL, and files. Your billing portal is where you pay invoices, view services, and open support tickets.
03 What are my SMTP settings for sending email?
Use your domain's mail server (typically mail.yourdomain.com) on port 587 with STARTTLS, or port 465 with SSL. Authenticate with your full email address and the mailbox password set in Enhance. Outbound limit: 30 emails per hour per account — see our T&Cs for the why.
04 How do I install WordPress?
From your hosting control panel: open the site, click App Installer, select WordPress, and complete the form. SSL is provisioned automatically. The whole install takes about a minute.
05 Why isn't my SSL working?
SSL certificates are issued automatically via Let's Encrypt the first time your domain resolves to our servers. If your SSL isn't active: confirm your domain is pointed to us (an A record to your assigned IP), wait 15 minutes, then re-check in Enhance under your site's SSL tab. Still stuck? Open a ticket and we'll look at the certificate issuance logs.
06 How do I back up my site?
We make internal backups for disaster recovery, but you should always keep your own copies. From Enhance, you can download a full backup of any site (files + database) on demand. For WordPress, plugins like UpdraftPlus or BlogVault can automate this to your own cloud storage. Per our T&Cs, the responsibility for your data sits with you.
07 Can I get a refund?
Yes — shared web hosting plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee from initial signup. Domain registrations are non-refundable once submitted to the registry. See our refund policy for details.
08 How do I migrate my existing site to you?
Open a ticket telling us what you're moving — site, mailboxes, the lot. We'll write back with a clear migration plan tailored to your setup. How much we do directly depends on what's consolidated with us: if your domain and DNS are also with us, we can handle the technical side end-to-end. If they're elsewhere, you'll do some steps yourself with our guidance. Either way, we stay on the ticket until it's done.
05 · Why no phone?

Every fix, written down.
On purpose.

Phone calls vanish. Two months later when the same issue comes up, neither of us has any record of what we discussed or what we changed. Tickets and chat give us — and you — a permanent log of every request, every fix, and every configuration change.

It also means whoever picks up your next ticket can see your full history immediately, instead of starting from scratch every time.

What that means in practice
  • Every config change is logged with the ticket
  • You can reference past tickets when raising new ones
  • No 'I spoke to someone but forgot their name'
  • Audit trail if anything goes wrong
  • Multiple sysadmins can pick up where one left off
06 · If a ticket stalls

How to escalate.

We try to never let a ticket stall — but if yours does, here's the path.

  1. 1

    Reply on the ticket

    Add a follow-up message asking for an update. This bumps the ticket to the top of the queue. Most stalls are simply because the original reply landed in spam or a context-switch happened.

  2. 2

    Flag as urgent

    If your site or email is down and you're not getting traction, mention "URGENT — service down" in the reply. We monitor for this and bump these to the front of the queue.

  3. 3

    Open a parallel ticket to billing

    If you genuinely can't get through to the support team, the billing department is staffed separately and can chase internally. Reference the stalled ticket number.

Still stuck?

We're right here.

Open a ticket with as much detail as you can — the more specific you are about what you're seeing, the faster we can fix it. Screenshots and exact error messages help.