Is it OK to get external help during your PhD if it is acknowledged? I am starting a PhD, and an interested in getting technical skills I will need over the next few years. 

Are there any ethical issues with paying for people to help you to get these skills, assuming they are fully acknowledged? 

From what I have read, I am working with the assumption that it is OK, as long as they are not "contributing to the research". However, this seems a bit fuzzy to me. Where does the boundary between the acceptable and unacceptable input lie?
In principle, as long as you give credit where credit is due, and as long as you do a thesis worth of work yourself, there need not be any problem.  A nice example: many large biosciences have lab-specific technicians or technicians in share core facilities who carry out routine work and protocols.  The student may not be paying them directly, but they are paid to do things for the benefit of the student's work (e.g., mouse colony maintenance, routine DNA preparation, sequencing, etc.) that may end up contributing to a thesis.

The specific examples of work that you want to outsource, however, are rather concerning.  If you are working on computer algorithms, then you should be comfortable with basic data analysis, plotting, and programming.  If you aren't, and need a tutor to help get your skills up to speed, that's fine.  If you're outsourcing simple but non-routine analyses that you should be doing yourself, however, it's likely to introduce serious problems because you will not be in a good position to debug the problems that will arise during analysis.  Furthermore, as a prospective future employer, it would also make me very concerned about your competence in your area of study.

In short: tutoring and outsourcing routine tasks if fine; outsourcing your core work is not.