October 21st, 2024
Hi Everyone,
I’m Dennis Nind, and I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve officially returned to the Enix team as Chief Experience Officer (CXO). After taking some time away, I’m excited to get back to working with so many familiar faces, and I’m really looking forward to improving your experience across all of our brands. For those who may not know me, I was the founder and CEO of Brixly, which was recently acquired by Enix. I’ve come back with one key mission: to ensure that the exceptional service and customer focus we built at Brixly are fully integrated across everything we do here at Enix.
I want to personally thank all of you for your patience during this time of change. I know it hasn’t been easy, and I completely understand some of the concerns you’ve raised. So, I’m writing today to give you an update on what’s been happening, what we’re working on, and how we plan to improve your overall experience going forward.
Note, that the list of plans and changes are extensive, so whilst I won’t outline them all here, please do be aware that myself and the rest of the team here at Enix are working incredibly hard behind the scenes to ensure a positive future for our clients.
Let’s start by addressing some of the key issues we’re actively working on. I know support response times and communication during outages have been frustrating for many of you. Believe me, we’ve heard your feedback, and we’re making it a top priority to fix these areas as quickly as possible. One of my main focuses since coming back has been to get us back to the fast, reliable, and responsive support that many of you were used to from Brixly. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting closer every day.
That being said, I can’t take credit for the incredible work that’s been happening behind the scenes. Our support team and management have been working tirelessly to manage the current workloads while continuing to push through some really challenging times. They’ve been doing an amazing job to ensure that your issues are addressed as quickly as possible, despite the additional pressure of our ongoing upgrades and changes. It’s their dedication and hard work that’s keeping things moving forward, and I want to recognise and thank them for all they do.
We’re also in the middle of some large-scale migrations and infrastructure upgrades that are essential for the long-term stability of our platform. I know migrations can be disruptive, but these changes are absolutely necessary to improve performance, reliability, and scalability as we continue to grow.
Many of you have asked about the ongoing hardware upgrades and migrations, so let me give you a quick update. As part of our growth and improvement plans, we’re upgrading to brand-new, high-performance hardware across all of our major locations. This includes increasing redundancy through CEPH replication, moving from 2x to 3x for better data protection, and rolling out higher levels of DDoS protection globally.
Some of the initial migrations involved DirectAdmin servers, which were previously hosted on legacy hardware. These have now been successfully migrated to our new cloud platform—something I had planned under the Brixly brand for some time, but didn’t have the manpower to execute. While the migration hasn’t been completely hiccup-free, and we understand there were some initial challenges, we’re thankfully past those issues now. These early migration difficulties also added significant pressure on our support teams, but with the combined manpower and expertise we have at Enix, we’ve successfully migrated the majority of our DirectAdmin servers to leading-edge infrastructure that actually surpasses what Brixly was able to offer. Since DirectAdmin migrations are typically more complex, it’s not surprising that there were some bumps along the way, but we’re now seeing much smoother transitions.
We’re also progressing through migrations at an excellent rate, and I’m happy to report that most are now going through without any significant issues. With cPanel to cPanel migrations, we benefit from the Live Transfer feature, which allows for seamless migration of accounts between servers with minimal to zero downtime. Live Transfer keeps sites online while the migration happens in the background, ensuring far less disruption. We’ve refined our migration process to make it as smooth as possible, and we’re confident this approach is helping us avoid the problems we encountered early on.
While we still have a substantial amount of infrastructure to move, we’re now doing so with far fewer issues and the overall impact on support and workloads has drastically improved. The support team is handling things much better, thanks to the refined processes and better management of migration workloads.
To help keep you informed, we’ll be posting a dedicated page on our website with the ongoing migration schedules, and we’ll link to this page from our status updates. This way, you’ll have full visibility of upcoming migrations and can plan accordingly.
For those of you managing external DNS services, one key change we’ve introduced to reduce the stress of immediate DNS updates is a 24-hour grace period after migrations. During this time, we’ll proxy traffic from the old servers to the new ones, giving you extra time to update IP addresses for clients using external DNS providers like Cloudflare. For clients using our nameservers, we’ll handle these updates automatically, so there’s nothing you need to worry about on your end.
I also want to address some concerns about delays in migrating certain servers. I completely understand that waiting for migrations can cause anxiety, but I want to assure you that these delays are actually a good thing. Rather than rushing the process, we’re taking a cautious and considerate approach to ensure we can resolve any potential performance issues before the migrations take place. A small delay is far better than facing problems after the migration is completed, and we believe this approach will lead to fewer post-migration issues overall.
One final note: the most common tickets we’re seeing post-migration are related to email clients still connecting to the old servers. While we automatically proxy mail during the migration, some email clients may still use DNS caching, which can cause them to attempt to connect to the old servers. The solution is simple: clearing the DNS cache after the migration will ensure your email clients connect to the new servers correctly.
One of the bigger projects we’ve been focusing on is our Enmail Gateway, which was developed to replace some of the external email services we were using, like MailChannels, which had become too expensive and restrictive for long-term use. We’ve made significant progress, and currently, the gateway is delivering emails successfully at a rate of 99%, which is a great start. However, we’re aware that some clients have encountered issues with RBLs (Real-time Blackhole Lists), such as Spamhaus, flagging new IP addresses.
We’ve opened direct communications with the majority of these RBL providers and are working closely with them to remediate the situation as quickly as possible. The challenges we’re facing right now are largely due to the sensitivity of some of these vendors who, despite our efforts to roll out the solution gradually, have flagged some of the new IPs simply because they are newly introduced into the system.
In standard use, Enmail is designed to automatically mitigate IP address blacklists in the background. If an IP gets flagged, the system removes it from our active pool, and when that IP is removed from an RBL, it gets re-added automatically. While this usually works seamlessly, at the moment, some vendors are being especially cautious with new IPs. We’re continuing to liaise with these RBL vendors to improve our overall email reputation, and in the meantime, we’re already successfully blocking outbound spam with an accuracy rate of 99.5%+. We're constantly refining the system, and we greatly appreciate your patience as we work through these final adjustments.
The move to Enmail is a positive one, even though we completely understand the frustration as we iron things out. Significant development effort has gone into this platform, especially after removing MailChannels from our servers. We knew this transition would take some time, but it’s a change that ultimately allows us to have full control over our email infrastructure, keeping costs down while maintaining (and eventually exceeding) the level of quality you expect.
To ensure we address any remaining issues as quickly as possible, our team is manning the system 24/7/365, closely monitoring performance and proactively tackling any challenges that arise. If you experience a failed delivery, simply re-attempting the send should, in most cases, result in a successful delivery, given how well the system is performing already. While we’re nearing an excellent delivery rate, we won’t stop until we’ve made it perfect.
There are clear benefits to having our own in-house developed solution for email delivery compared to relying on commercial providers like MailChannels. By developing Enmail ourselves, we avoid being locked into vendor pricing increases, and it gives us the flexibility to refine and improve the platform continuously. It also allows us to respond faster to any issues that arise and optimize the system for the specific needs of our infrastructure and clients. This level of control simply isn’t possible with commercial email relay services, and we believe this will be a huge win for all our clients in the long run.
I know many of you have noticed a drop in support response times, and I completely understand your frustration. This is something we’re actively addressing right now. In the past, Brixly was known for its fast, friendly, and effective support, and that’s exactly what we intend to bring back. While there have been delays recently, particularly since the acquisition, I want to emphasize that these challenges are temporary, and our goal is to not only return to the fast response times you were used to but to exceed them once we’re through this transitional phase.
Since the acquisition, support response times have been extensively delayed compared to what you’re accustomed to, and we fully understand the frustration this has caused. These delays have largely been driven by the ongoing migrations, queries related to the acquisition, and, at one point, an issue with a DirectAdmin server, which has since been fully resolved. Rest assured, this isn’t a long-term situation. Once the migrations are complete, our intention is to get response times back to what they were before—or even better.
I want to emphasize that all of the familiar faces from Brixly are still here, working hard to resolve your queries. We’ve also brought in additional support staff, which has significantly strengthened our ability to answer tickets quickly and efficiently. A huge shout-out goes to both the support team and the management team at Enix for getting us to where we are today. Thanks to their tireless work, response times have already improved from 12–14 hours at their peak, to around 1–2 hours on average right now (although of course, this may vary on a day to day basis, and will be naturally longer for Senior escalations).
In fact, in the past two weeks alone, we’ve added four new team members to help with the workload, and this has made a noticeable difference in how quickly we’re able to respond. We’re not at the perfect stage yet, but we’re on the right path, and I truly appreciate your patience as we continue to refine and improve.
Behind the scenes, we’ve been working hard to streamline and prioritize support tickets more accurately. This includes developing tools that use AI to analyze ticket content, flag recurring issues, and prioritize urgent matters, making it easier for our team to address the most critical issues as efficiently as possible. We’ve also implemented strategies to gain detailed insights into the types of tickets being raised, which allows us to better understand where issues are cropping up and how we can proactively reduce them.
While we do expect response times to be slower than ideal throughout the remainder of the migration period, I’m confident that once this phase is over, we’ll be back to optimal service levels, and our response times will be drastically improved. Our focus is entirely on getting through this transitional period while continuing to improve your experience every step of the way.
Thank you again for your continued support, and we won’t rest until we’ve gotten support back to the high standards you deserve.
We understand that telephone support for our premium clients has been near non-existent throughout this period, and we sincerely apologize for this. The sheer volume of support requests we’ve been handling, particularly with the ongoing migrations, has made it incredibly difficult to provide the level of telephone support you expect. Telephone support, by its nature, consumes significantly more time than our ticket system, and it also lacks the ability to give every issue the full attention it deserves while balancing a high volume of requests. While we can’t promise an immediate fix, we do expect to resume full telephone support service once the migration process is fully completed and things are more settled.
The same goes for live chat support. At the moment, we’re working to consolidate our live chat environments across all brands so that we can resume the response times you’ve come to expect. Even back at Brixly, we never promoted live chat as being "instant," but we understand that this service has been an important part of your experience. Our goal, post-migration, is to return to a point where live chat can be responsive and reliable. Please bear with us as we work toward making this feasible again.
In the meantime, we kindly ask that you avoid using telephone or live chat for urgent requests until the situation surrounding support has settled. The ticket system remains the most efficient way to reach us, and we’re doing everything we can to make sure your tickets are handled as quickly as possible.
We also know that communication during outages or incidents hasn’t been as clear or timely as it should be. That’s on us, and we’re actively working to fix it. Moving forward, we’re committed to keeping you better informed when there are service issues, with more frequent updates on our status pages and greater transparency about what’s going on behind the scenes. This will help ensure you’re always in the loop and reduce the need to reach out to support for updates.
While all of our servers are centrally monitored, there is still a consolidation phase we need to complete to ensure that communication is improved and that our status pages are updated in a timely fashion. This is something we’re very aware of and are already working on behind the scenes.
We also recognize the need to improve our status pages across the board, with more consistent and regular updates during incidents. The current support volume has made it challenging to dedicate resources specifically to this, but we know where improvements need to be made and are making it a priority. Once fully implemented, this small change will make a big difference in ensuring you’re always aware of what’s happening.
I want to end by thanking you all once again for sticking with us during this time of transition. I know things haven’t been perfect, and we’ve faced some real challenges along the way, but I want you to know that we’re working tirelessly to get everything back on track. My return to Enix is all about ensuring that we put you—our customers—front and centre. Your feedback has been invaluable, and I’m here to ensure that we turn those insights into real, meaningful improvements.
I also want to take this opportunity to give huge credit to the owners of Enix. Even though the transition has been difficult at times, I want to assure you that they have been working endlessly behind the scenes to make sure that the experience improves for every single one of you. While you might not hear from them directly on support, know that they are always working in your best interests—whether that’s through ensuring our infrastructure is top-tier or driving strategic decisions to help us grow and improve. Their work might not always be visible, but it is instrumental in the progress we’ve made, and it was a big part of why I chose Enix to acquire Brixly in the first place.
The Enix team has been nothing short of outstanding. They’ve approached every challenge with professionalism, dedication, and a clear focus on delivering the best for our customers. The hardware they’ve sourced is nothing less than outstanding, and the level of planning and attention to detail that goes into each decision is exceptional. From behind the scenes, the effort and precision are among the best I’ve seen in this industry. I understand that it’s not always easy to recognise this from the outside, especially when things don’t seem perfect, but I remain fully confident in my decision to choose Enix as our partner, and they play a huge part in my decision to return.
It’s important to acknowledge that customers often only see part of the picture. A tremendous amount of planning, collaboration, and execution happens behind the scenes—whether it’s upgrading hardware, developing software, or training our support teams. These efforts are all geared toward providing you with the best possible experience. While we know things haven’t always been smooth, rest assured that every action we’re taking is to ensure a more reliable, stronger service moving forward.
We have some exciting things ahead, and I’m confident that, with these changes, we’ll not only meet your expectations but exceed them. Once again, thank you so much for your support and patience. I truly appreciate it, and I look forward to reconnecting with you all as we continue to make these exciting improvements.
Best regards,
Dennis Nind
Chief Experience Officer, Enix Brands