From feedback from many customers we decided to change our newsletter from weekly to monthly. We had been sending our weekly newsletter each week without fail for 3 years. We had a number of customers say it was too regular and a number of people on the team felt it was maybe a bit too often.

The goal of our newsletter is to keep you informed about what we’re doing behind the scenes and keep you up to date with our developments. If you have any feedback on our newsletter, what you’d like to know more about on a regular basis please let us know by replying to this newsletter message. You can always opt-out of the newsletter by emailing newsletter@m6.net with remove in the subject line or message

Since our last newsletter we’ve been head down and headlong into a lot of operational tasks. Our goal in the past few months has been to improve our operations and strive for a level of excellence as part of our continual improvement program.

We had had a few issues earlier in the year namely retiring older servers, dealing with hackers and spammers which compounded our usual task load and overloaded the team. We took a step back, developed a plan to solve the issues, learn from them and build strength as part of our goal for continual improvement - then we got on with it with force. Since then we’ve balanced servers, retired old and problematic servers, upgraded mail servers, fine tuned security settings on all mail and web servers, replaced and reconfigured our active directory domain, improved our fraud detection systems and installed and optimized new servers for our own back-end control panel, and intranet systems, and installed a new phone system. These initiatives have seen improvements in speed, quality and support response.

Support has been at a consistently good level for a month now and we have all our MMM (Management, Monitoring and Maintenance) procedures refined and running well, proactively dealing with potential issues before they become issues. If you feel we’ve missed you and you are having service issues please email feedback@m6.net and if you still feel like you are not being heard please email me at michaelg@m6.net and I will follow through with the people who are the best ones to resolve your concerns. I do look over feedback@m6.net, but those emails get handled by Bob and Gavan directly.

As part of this cleanup and clean out we’ve got excess server inventory which we have available and are passing on to any customers who wish to take advantage of a ProDeveloper hosting package. You can find out more information about this at http://www.m6.net/pd-web-hosting-special.aspx

Over the holiday period we will be running normal support - there will be people available to help you every day, right through Christmas and New years.

Wishing you a happy holiday season and a peaceful and prosperous new year. Thank you for hosting with us and we look forward to hosting your sites as you grow throughout 2007.

As Michael has explained, in the weeks since our last newsletter, we’ve had a rather eventful time.

We have retired our oldest machines, which is a huge step for us as it means we no longer have to deal with our legacy Windows 2000 machines, and we are able to offer all manner of new technologies such as .Net 2.0 to all our customers and not just the later adopters. We have been able to alter some of the core assumptions of our control panel and automation systems, to remove a lot of the legacy baggage we’ve picked up over the past years.

We’ve upgraded all but one of our mail servers to SmarterMail 3.3 - a generally positive result of a global upward spike in the total amount of spam being sent and received - and we can now cope with the millions of emails that move through our systems every day, with capacity to spare.

The support team has expanded, and our procedures and operations have solidified somewhat -- a result of our systems homogenising with Windows 2003, SmarterMail 3.x, etc. We also have a much better answering system, that will only improve - messages left while support is on the phone now appear in the support queue with all the other support queries, instead of the entirely isolated system we had before; and we have plans to add a layer to allow you to enter your client ID and receive relevant alerts over the phone - similar to the system we have as part of copanel - as well as leave a support query you can later amend.

Overall, we’ve tightened our operations, upgraded our infrastructure and are now in a much better position to offer new hosting products and solutions; we have identified a few niches that we are ideally suited to fill, and a few products we can offer that stand to dramatically improve your hosting experience.

Happy Holidays!

Firstly I"d like to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday period, I hope that 2006 was good for you and that 2007 will be even better still.

The main issues in support over the past month have been mostly related to Email, we’ve upgraded 2 servers recently to SmarterMail version 3, this has seen mail on the concerned servers become more reliable and efficient, which was one of the biggest customer concerns. We’re now running version 3 on all mail servers bar one, which will no doubt be upgraded before long. We have also implemented a new phone answering service, which will digitally record your voicemail and insert it into our database as a support query if you can’t get through to us when you call. This was also a major concern for some of our clients who were having trouble reaching us, this new system will help make the phone system more streamlined in terms of how the messages left are attended to.