Changelog

Incoming Spam Filtering
During the last week, engineers have been monitoring spam filtering performance, and we’ve isolated a few issues and created fixes. This is deploying now. All users should see an improvement in spam filtering within the next hour. The fixes are as follows:

- Identified cause of low scoring spam not being delivered to user’s spam box in some situations. Any email which meets the low scoring spam threshold will now be delivered into the user’s spambox without exception.

- Fixed problem causing RBL lookup failure sin some scenarios.

- Reduced default low spam score to ‘2’ to better match incoming spam scoring.

- Identified cause of “{Spam}” being prefixed to some subjects (linked to spambox issue) and resolved.

As always we will continue to monitor the incoming email and tweak the filters until we have the perfect balance.

Outgoing Email Deliverability
Email reputation with Microsoft continues to improve. We’re still seeing a < 0.1% spam complaint ratio on all hosts, and we continue to press Microsoft to delist and de-throttle servers given there is no legitimate reason they continue to be throttled.

Since the start of today, we’ve achieved a 95% success rate with deliveries to the Microsoft network. We hope to be at 100% by the end of the week at the latest.

As always, thank you for patience and understanding. I’ll update again as more information becomes available.

Elliot

As I write this, it has been just over four weeks since Enix acquired Brixly. A fair amount has happened since then, and as has been correctly pointed out to me, communication is key. So, here is a bit more of an introduction to Enix, our plans, and what has transpired in the last four weeks.

Some of the following points reiterate my comments on the feedback board. If you have read those comments, some of this may sound familiar, but I think it’s best to include them here for everyone to see.

A Brief Enix History

Enix was started in 2006 by myself and my business partner Nick. We began as PHP developers working on mission-critical sites with extremely high traffic, gaining substantial experience in high-availability application development and infrastructure management.

Dream Hosting started very small at first under the domain dream-hosting.co.uk. We purchased this domain and a handful of hosting clients from someone we used to work with, initially as a side hustle. Over the years, it has grown significantly. We’ve made plenty of mistakes and learned a lot along the way.

Around 2013, Dream Hosting (and several other domains) combined into hostpresto.com, which has become our primary brand. Since then, we’ve gradually made acquisitions, either keeping them as standalone brands or merging them into hostpresto.com. As of now, we have four primary hosting brands (have a look on enixltd.com).

Staff

As we’ve grown, our team has expanded as well, with each acquisition bringing in more extremely talented staff. Here is a brief introduction:

• Elliot - CEO/CTO: I push things forward, manage the business side, and head up the infrastructure. I am an experienced sysadmin and developer.

• Nick - COO: Ensures smooth operations and manages day-to-day activities. He is a seasoned developer and sysadmin.

• Dennis - CXO (From Oct 2024): When Dennis returns, he’ll resume his role in communications, support management, and strategy without the additional headache of running the business, ensuring you get the best possible experience.

• Mike / Sam / Liam / Danny: 2nd Line and Managed Services Support. Experts in web hosting and server management of all types.

• Declan, Chris, Andy, Rob, Harry, Paul, Wesley, Tom, Shabs, Faizal: 1st Line Support. All of them are extremely experienced, hardworking, and knowledgeable.

• Development and Engineering Team: Behind the scenes, Enix has a team of ten developers and engineers working on new services, products, optimisations, and maintaining operations.
  

The Recent, Controversial Email Changes and Reasons Why

The decision to remove MailChannels and SpamExperts was made early in our plans for Brixly, following extensive discussions with Dennis. Brixly provides a premium service at a non-premium price, and Dennis has done a remarkable job getting it to this point.

I won’t hide the fact that SpamExperts and MailChannels are very expensive, and it’s a cost that needed to be removed. In the interest of transparency, Brixly needed help, and if it wasn’t Enix, it would have been someone else. Brixly is a premium host at a non-premium price. Customers get a lot of value, but Brixly cannot survive at its current cost structure.

Losing Brixly would be a great shame, and our acquisition is not a cash grab; we’re trying to get it into a sustainable situation to continue growing and improving it. I truly believe Enix was the best choice for everyone involved, and Dennis agrees. We are both incredibly similarly minded regarding web hosting, aiming to achieve the same goals in the same ways.

Email hosting in the shared hosting and reseller environment is challenging. How can you host mission-critical email at an average cost of £1/month per website (or websites if you allow addon domains) with virtually unlimited mailboxes on a reseller package? It’s not easy, considering Office 365 and Google Workspace cost £6/month+ per email account. We will always do our best to provide top-notch service, but managing expectations is essential.

While the decision to remove MailChannels and SpamExperts may seem drastic, it was necessary. It will be the most impactful change on customers, and the worst of it is now behind us.

At Enix, we’ve been running cPanel and related infrastructure on a large scale for some time. We’ve used a heavily tweaked version of MailScanner for around ten years. Additionally, we have comprehensive systems to monitor and filter outgoing email, taking action on spam. Customer issues regarding incoming spam or email delivery are minimal, if any. It’s a great system that works well for all concerned.

Is MailChannels and SpamExperts better than our new solution? That’s subjective. We’ve had a mix of customers: some desperate for those services to return, and others preferring the control our solution provides.

MailChannels had a couple of major outages recently, making us uncomfortable due to the lack of control. What if the outage lasted a couple of days? A week? There’s also the issue of data security. Using third parties for email exposes us to risks. If Enix is compromised, that’s on us. If a third party is compromised, it’s still on us.

Confident in our ability to provide reliable email without third parties, we decided to remove MailChannels and SpamExperts. This aligns with our Enix ethos: to provide great hosting at the best prices and to do this for the long term by owning the technology stack fully.

Key Points of Our Ethos:

1. Control: We avoid relying on third parties for services where possible, managing them ourselves to avoid dependency.

2. Future-proofing: By building and maintaining our systems, we have full control and can implement improvements with long-term predictability.

3. Financial Stability: The cPanel buyout led to a significant cost increase for hosts worldwide, coupled with increased energy costs and inflation. Relying on third parties like MailChannels or SpamExperts means we cannot control those costs.

This shapes our long-term plan, which I’ll highlight further on.

What Went Wrong?

Despite thorough planning, we didn’t foresee Microsoft blocking our IP ranges immediately. We barely sent an email before they did this. We’ve opened around 200 tickets with MS to have the blocks removed. Despite our clean servers, they didn’t like the sudden increase in volume from our ranges.

Over the past week, we’ve had increasing success with deliveries. Our anti-spam measures keep our servers at less than a 0.1% complaint ratio, the lowest MS report.

During this time, support tickets overwhelmed our team. I brought in emergency extra support, but it was sometimes a losing battle. I have had very little sleep this past week, and the team has worked tirelessly. While our support quality has slipped, I’m proud of what our team managed given the circumstances.

The issues were compounded with incoming spam performance. It takes time for the spam system to warm up and learn. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have made both incoming and outgoing changes simultaneously, but we’re learning from this.

The issue is improving hour by hour, and we’ll work tirelessly until it’s fully resolved. I apologise to all customers affected by the recent issues. Please know that we have taken it seriously and done everything within our capability to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. I thank everyone for their understanding and patience.

This is not going to be a regularly occurring event. This was the single biggest and most impactful change we wanted to make. Normal service will resume. We have a couple more changes coming, but they will be relatively minor, which brings me to the next point.

What the Hell Are You Going to Do to My Service Next?!

One more significant change is coming, but it’s not on the same scale as the email change.

Brixly currently rents all hardware from various suppliers across the world. Enix, however, owns and operates all our hardware for stability, control, and financial optimisation. Removing third-party costs is necessary for Brixly’s viability and allows us to invest in improvements.

Brixly is almost treading water, and we want it to move forward like a cruise ship—steady and sure, with plenty to offer and perhaps a little fun.

In 6-8 weeks, Enix will start migrating customers to our infrastructure from the rented infrastructure. This migration will be done slowly over the course of 6-12 months. These will be like-for-like migrations (cPanel or DirectAdmin) to servers with the same configuration and packages. Some customers have already been migrated to Enix infrastructure to sidestep the email issues, and new Brixly customers have been deployed to the Enix infrastructure for the last four weeks.

Both Enix and Brixly have significant experience with these migrations, and they will be effortless for you. The server hostnames will remain the same, but the IPs will change. Migrations will be scheduled, and you’ll be notified well in advance.

The bonus will be the new hardware. As part of the Brixly acquisition, Enix has committed over half a million pounds to new hardware for our next-generation infrastructure. The latest AMD Epyc CPUs and NVMe SSDs will be used. Here’s how it will compare to the current hardware:

• Newer AMD Epyc Milan CPUs

• Enterprise-grade, high-capacity NVMe SSDs forming a 1.5PB storage cluster

• High-speed, low-latency networking

• Ceph Storage cluster with triple redundancy vs the current 2x

• Backups to NVMe SSD storage for ultra-fast backups and restores (critical in a DR situation)

• Highly optimised for less power usage and powered by 100% green energy

For our customers in the US and EU regions, the same hardware will be deployed, offering an even greater improvement over the current rented hardware, and we aim to increase our presence in these regions over time with a larger product offering.

Long-Term Plans

Our team of ten developers and engineers has been working on projects behind the scenes for the last few years. Here’s a highlight of what’s coming, although you won’t see any of this until at least Q1 2025, once migrations are complete.

• Enmail: A new, purpose-built enterprise-grade email cluster for mission-critical email. We’ve taken the best in open source and built a new email cluster on top of Kubernetes for infinite scalability, MailChannels-like outbound load balancing, and more. This will be offered free to all customers to replace cPanel-based email.

• Encuro: A billing and support system designed to surpass all others. It features a comprehensive API for reselling all products, a comprehensive migration centre, whitelabel for resellers, and full integration into WHMCS.

• Envision: A cPanel-like hosting platform built on Kubernetes for ultimate performance and flexibility. It offers high-speed caching out of the box, optimised PHP processing, and complete scalability and redundancy for 100% uptime.

• Generally: We will improve customer experience and flows, including support, migrations, documentation, and all of the other ‘basics’.

We won’t force any services or products on anyone. We know many of our customers prefer cPanel or DirectAdmin, and these will always be options. We want these services to add value for you, not just for us.

In Conclusion

I started this update at 6 AM this morning, and now my fingers hurt. I should probably check in with the rest of the team. I hope this sheds some light on us as a company, our thought process, the reasons for our actions, and what’s coming.

As I mentioned on the feedback board, Nick, Dennis, and I truly want Enix and Brixly to be the best hosting service available, and we’re committed to keeping it there for the long term.

I’ll make every effort to update as regularly as required on changes in as much detail as possible. I hope for all of our sakes this will be it for a little while at least!

Elliot

For the first phase of our improvement program we’re focusing on email delivery reliability for outbound email, and anti-spam solutions for inbound email. We’re moving to a new solution which will provide better email delivery rates and higher reliability, as well as a new inbound spam solution to provide better anti-spam protection.

This change will be completed by us, on the server, and the majority of customers won’t need to make any changes.  However if you manage your own DNS records externally to Brixly, and you use Brixly’s servers for your incoming and outgoing email services you will need to update your DNS records. You will have already received an email detailing the exact changes you need to make.

To be clear, if you use the Brixly nameservers (any hostns.io nameserver) then you do not need to make these changes yourself, we’ll take care of this for you. You can make these changes anytime between now and midnight, on Thursday, 18th July 2024.

I’m Elliot Pearse, CEO of Enix Ltd. I’m writing to inform you that Brixly Ltd has been acquired by Enix. As of today, 1st July 2024, you will be fully managed, supported, and invoiced by Enix Ltd.

Firstly, I want to assure you that you’re in excellent hands. We are an independent UK web host based on the South Coast. Our offices, servers, and all of our staff are located in the UK. Over the last 18 years, we have grown to become one of the UK’s leading independent hosting providers, with myself at the helm since inception. My team and I are passionate about providing the best hosting service in the industry at competitive prices. I can promise that the outstanding service and support you received from Brixly will continue with us.

You’ll be pleased to know that every member of the Brixly team is staying in their roles and continuing to provide top-notch support, just as before. You may also see a few new names from the Enix team.

After a well-earned break, Brixly’s owner, Dennis, will join the Enix team later this year. We'd like to share this message from Dennis with you: 

“First and foremost, I want to say a huge, huge thank you for your loyalty and support. 

I've loved every moment of working with you all and am immensely proud of what we have achieved as a brand over the years. With the help of our incredible support team and you as clients, Brixly has developed into a label of excellence within the industry, recognised in over 130 countries as one of the leading hosting platforms for resellers.

I knew, though, that after all these years, I needed a break. I wanted to ensure that the business, the staff, and you as clients were incredibly well looked after during that period, and I know wholeheartedly that Elliot and his team at Enix are the perfect choice. The transition will open many new doors, opportunities, improvements, and growth in all areas—something that was becoming increasingly challenging as sole owner. 

Thank you for your continued trust. The team you rely on will still be here to support you. This is simply a stepping stone to something extraordinary, and I look forward to being part of it on my return.”
 

Moving forward, you may be wondering what is changing. The answer is simple: good things are going to happen with minimal hassle for you. We’re an independent UK host, just like Brixly. We own and operate all of our hardware in the UK, and our offices and staff are all UK-based. We are not a big multinational corporation. In transitions like this, many people have concerns about service levels dropping—I can assure you that we will continue to build upon the excellent service you are accustomed to and strive to improve it as much as possible.

With Brixly becoming part of Enix, we can expand our products and services to give you more flexibility. Here are some highlights of our plans for the next 12 months:

• Newer, higher specification servers.

• Improved international infrastructure.

• Improved email spam filtering.

• Specialised products for optimised and managed WordPress and Magento hosting.

• On-demand, high-spec modern dedicated servers.

• Improved billing and support systems.

• Expanded migration centre.
  

Of course, we will keep you updated with the developments as they happen. Firstly, we plan to overhaul the Brixly email spam filter system, as its reliability has been a cause for concern in recent months. We will make these changes as transparent as possible and will be in touch with information in the coming days.

We’ll also be prioritising upgrading of our international infrastructure, deploying the latest AMD EPYC series CPUs and NVMe SSD storage to both our US and EU locations.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns. 

Kind regards,

Elliot Pearse
CEO, Enix Ltd

We are excited to announce an important update to our server security solutions. After extensive testing and evaluation, we have decided to implement cpGuard as the new security software across our fleet of servers, replacing Imunify360.

While Imunify360 has served us well, we identified a few areas where we could improve our service. Specifically, we found that full server scans were time-consuming with Imunify360, and it did not offer the level of detail our clients needed when viewing attacks on their domains.

We have started a full server scan on servers, and have found a larger number of genuine malware files are being detected with the cpGuard solution than were prior.

Additionally, we encountered a technical issue with Imunify360 where a large number of requests were being logged server-side from the local address (127.0.0.1), which they have not been able to resolve. This led to an increased load on our servers.

Since we began testing cpGuard, we have observed a significant reduction in server load by at least 20%, with some servers experiencing even greater improvements. Performance monitoring reports have also shown enhanced stability across our server network.

The transition to cpGuard will be gradual to ensure a smooth changeover. During this period, the Imunify360 interface will still be visible in cPanel but may result in a 404 error. We ask that you disregard this until the rollout is complete.

We are committed to providing you with the best possible service and believe that cpGuard will offer superior security and performance. We appreciate your understanding and patience during this upgrade process.

We are writing to inform you of important changes to our WHMCS license offerings that will be taking place due to an increase in upstream costs from WHMCS themselves.

Please note that WHMCS stopped providing a 'Starter' licence some time back; however, to minimise impact to clients, we have decided to continue offering this licence at the same cost of £6.95, which is around 90% of the licences we have active.

Why the Change is Required: The cost of providing WHMCS licenses has risen due to increased charges from our upstream providers. These changes are a direct result of adjustments in the market and the evolving landscape of web hosting services. We have absorbed as much of these costs as possible, but unfortunately, we must adjust our pricing to sustain the high level of service and support you expect from us.

New Sales of WHMCS Licenses: Effective immediately, the pricing for new sales of WHMCS licenses will reflect these upstream cost changes. We understand that price changes can be challenging, but we assure you that our new rates remain competitive while allowing us to maintain the quality of our offerings.

Realigning WHMCS Renewal Costs: For our existing clients, we will be undergoing a process to realign WHMCS renewal costs starting from the 1st of April 2024.

WHMCS Starter - £6.95/m

WHMCS Plus - £14.95/m

WHMCS - Professional - £24.95/m

WHMCS - Business - £39.95/m

WHMCS - Business 2500 - £99.95/m

WHMCS - Business 5000 - £149.95/m

WHMCS - Business 10,000 - £199.95/m

We are dedicated to transparency and are here to support you through these changes. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to our support team by raising a support ticket.

Thank you for your attention to this matter and for your continued support.

We're excited to announce some significant updates to our VPS and Public Cloud offerings, designed to streamline your experience and simplify the product segmentation of both products.

VPS Servers: Tailored Flexibility with VPS Builder Our VPS Servers have always been synonymous with flexibility and scalability. To enhance this, we've introduced the new VPS Builder, a tool that simplifies the process of customizing your server. With the VPS Builder, you can select the exact resources you need, such as RAM, CPU, and storage, and easily add additional services like control panel licenses for cPanel, Imunify360, backups, and more.

VPS Servers are now even easier to purchase, with transparent upfront pricing and a 30-day rolling agreement. Full root access remains a standard feature, giving you complete control over your server via our client area.

Public Cloud: On-Demand Compute with Predictable Pricing Our Public Cloud service has been refined to offer on-demand cloud compute resources with a straightforward, usage-based pricing model. You're only charged for the time your server is active, offering predictability similar to other cloud providers like Digital Ocean and Linode.

The Public Cloud comes with API access and the ability to manage servers in bulk through separate 'Projects.' Its intuitive control panel allows quick actions like spinning up, destroying, or rescaling machines. Billing is conveniently raised once a month, on the 1st.

Simplified Management and Deployment Previously, the distinction between our flexible and pre-defined plans caused some confusion. Flexible plans were managed through our client area. In contrast, pre-defined plans had a separate portal for more detailed provisioning control.

To address this, we've separated these products to ensure clarity and targeted service. Now, you can choose the solution that best fits your project requirements without the complexity of navigating different management systems.

We are thrilled to announce the release of 'Webuzo' as a one-click installer for our cloud servers! Webuzo is an all-in-one web hosting control panel that helps you manage a cloud server effortlessly.

It's an excellent alternative to cPanel, offering much of the same functionality at a fraction of the cost. With licensing prices starting from just $2.50 for a single user and going up to $25 for unlimited users, Webuzo is incredibly affordable.

The interface of Webuzo is designed to be very familiar to those who have used cPanel, making the transition smooth and intuitive. It provides a powerful, yet simple way to manage your websites, databases, emails, and more. Webuzo is perfect for those who want the control and flexibility of cPanel without the higher cost.

Clients can take advantage of Webuzo by provisioning a new Cloud Server from our Cloud Server portal, which is available with hourly billing for maximum flexibility. To get started, simply go to 'Manage Cloud Servers' in our client area and click on 'Add / Manage Cloud Servers'. When creating your server, you'll find Webuzo in the list of applications, alongside other server templates and applications such as cPanel and Plesk.

For those interested in exploring Webuzo before making a decision, a demo of the panel is available at https://webuzo.com/demo/. And for detailed pricing information, please visit https://webuzo.com/pricing/.