OPENSRS: 2012

jueves, 20 de diciembre de 2012

A Review of 2012 at OpenSRS

Posted: 19 Dec 2012 12:56 PM PST

It has been a busy year at OpenSRS, so I thought I’d take the time to look back at some of the highlights.

ccTLDs

We bought epag in 2011, helping us add over 100 new second and third-level extensions to our portfolio. But doing so took plenty of development and time incorporating them into OpenSRS, making it easier for you to do business around the globe all from a single platform. And we’re not done yet!

Working Better with Third-Party Systems

We joined the Parallels Domain Name Network early in the year so resellers can signup to sell OpenSRS directly within Parallels products. Plus we’ve been testing updated and more robust plugins for WHMCS.

goMobi Updates

We’ve had goMobi available for a couple years now, but I think you’d agree some great new features were rolled out this year to make it worth a mention. Some of the new features included: custom icons, live previews, more sharing options, more site templates, custom background images, plus many more. We’ve seen incredible interest in this product, and can’t wait to see the new sites you build with it.

Ting Offers

We rolled out a revenue sharing Offer for Ting, the Tucows mobile phone MVNO in the US. While still new and relatively small, we’re very excited about the growth in Ting and working with our resellers to expand its reach. And for resellers who’d like to try before recommending Ting, we launched trial program called Taste of Ting.

Webmail 5.6

Our hosted email product got a nice facelift on the front-end and some much needed upgrades in the backend. Although email suffered some unfortunate outages this year, we’ve removed the main source of the problem from our infrastructure. 2013 should be much smoother…

Super Low EV Pricing and UC/SAN Certs

In September we cut pricing on Extended Validation certificates across the board to be industry leading; and boy have you seized the opportunity. Making the jump from OV to EV certs for the better features is now a much smaller price gap; which is a great value proposition you can make to your customers. Perhaps 2013 will be the year DV certs go away…

Help & Support Upgrades

Part of being “Reseller Friendly” is providing a great customer support experience. To help us achieve this for you each we’ve begun rolling out a few ‘upgrades.’ First, the new support site which brings together in one place our announcements, knowledge bases and forums; plus a robust ticketing system. We’ve also begun asking for feedback after each ticket is resolved and closed; not only telling us how we’re doing but giving insights into how we can improve going forward.

We’re delighted to have you as part of the OpenSRS ecosystem; and we’re looking forward to surprising and delighting you in 2013.

martes, 18 de diciembre de 2012

Holiday Hours from December 25, 2012 – January 2, 2013

Posted: 17 Dec 2012 08:50 AM PST

Happy Holidays to you and yours from the OpenSRS team!

holiday-ecard-2012

We’ll be taking some time over the next week to enjoy the holidays with our families and friends. Here’s our holiday hours by department.

Hours by department:

Department	Dates and Hours
Reseller Support	No phone, email or live chat support from 5pm on December 24 until 8am on December 26 and from 5pm on December 31 until 8am on January 2.
Payments	Closed on December 25 and 26 and January 1, with reduced staffing on the remaining days.
Compliance	Closed December 25 through January 1 inclusive.
Service Bureau (for transactions requiring manual processing)	Closed on December 25 and 26 and January 1 with reduced staffing on the remaining days.

Our normal hours will resume on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013. Best wishes for a prosperous 2013!

viernes, 14 de diciembre de 2012

Change to Ting end user offers in January

Posted: 13 Dec 2012 11:13 AM PST

I want to let our US resellers know about a change we are making to your Ting promo codes.

Starting on Tuesday, January 15, 2013, all codes that currently offer $50 discounts to end users will now be offering a $25 discount. The 25% revenue shares or $50 bounties to resellers associated with these offers will remain the same.

Please be sure to revise all communications that promote the $50 by then. Also feel free to let your customer know they should “act now” to get a deal they will not be able to get anywhere on January 15.

The simple explanation, after almost a year of analysis on the business, is that $50 is just a bit too much to maintain the margins we (all) need on a customer and that $50 now seems unnecessarily generous for a service that is saving even the smallest businesses hundreds of dollars a year.

Of course, the most important thing is that you will still have the best possible offer a customer can find anywhere. To be clear, we will be reducing absolutely any promotions out there to $25 as well.

Many of you have $75 service credits, with no associated revenue share or bounty, that we offered you to sign up yourselves and your employees. Those can still be used discreetly.

Along with this change, all codes that currently offer $25 discounts to end users along with either 30% revenue shares or $75 bounties will be disabled. These have not been used much since, presumably, most of you only wanted the very best offer you could get for your customers. And with the best offer coming down now, there really isn’t room for these any longer.

Also, starting today, if you have not already generated a $50 discount code, you will not be able to generate a new one. Again, if you already have these codes, they will continue to offer a $50 discount until January 15. But we figured we would not make offers available anymore that are soon to be extinct.

We know it is never easy to offer the customer less. We hope this does not create disappointment.

We continue to focus on crafting an offering that:

- Extends significant value to your customers.
- Provides healthy, sustainable margins to you.

We remain confident that Ting does both. As always, we appreciate any feedback or ideas.

lunes, 10 de diciembre de 2012

Making Reseller Support Better plus 1 more

Making Reseller Support Better

Posted: 10 Dec 2012 06:19 AM PST

We’re working on making Reseller Support better.

That’s pretty easy to say, right? I know I’ve said it to resellers myself when I’ve talked to some of you at trade shows, or on the phone.

It’s also pretty easy for you to respond with, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” or something similar. That’s probably a fair response. I know where you are coming from. We know where you are coming from.

What “Better” Means

“Better” is a neat little word. As a writer, I love to think about words and “better” is one that has a lot of nuance.

Better doesn’t necessarily mean awesome. It can mean awesome – as in, “Remember that great dinner we had last week? This one was better.” But “better” can also mean terrible – as in, “An expired can of tuna on stale crackers for dinner is better than nothing.”

One thing that “better” implies is that there’s a comparison going on. In the case of Reseller Support, it’s this – “That interaction I just had with Reseller Support was better than the last one I had.’

We’re working right now so that when you mark an issue as solved, you’ll say to yourself, “Yup, that was better again!” In other words, we’re improving things with a recognition that our work will never be done, and that we can always “do better”.

You are the best judge of what “better” means right now. Maybe for you right now it’s “okay” or “alright” (or even “terrible”). Eventually “better” will mean great and then a little bit later on, “better” will mean awesome. We’ll get there in time.

Measuring Our Progress

In order to know whether we are getting better, we need to be able to measure ourselves against some standard. We implemented Transactional Net Promoter Score surveys last week as one way to measure whether we’re getting better over time. Read more about that here.

We’re also quantifying some standards for Support so that we are able to easily measure our progress.

You deserve to know what those standards are so that you know what to expect, and so you can hold us responsible if we fail to meet them. Here are the objectives we’ve set for Reseller Support:

Phone support: Call 1-888-511-7284 (U.S. and Canada) or +800 371 69922 (International) between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. EST (13:00 and 23:00 UTC) and a live person who is able to help you will pick up the phone within 20 seconds. Outside of those hours, you can call and leave a voicemail message, or you can email help@opensrs.com. Incoming voicemail and email is monitored 24/7 and critical issues will be addressed as required.
Email support: We will answer your email support request within 24 hours of receiving it (often much more quickly). You can email help@opensrs.com anytime and the 24 hour clock starts when we get it, no matter the time of day. Support staff will respond to incoming support requests between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. EST (13:00 and 23:00 UTC). Outside of those hours, incoming email is monitored 24/7 and critical issues will be addressed as required.
Chat support: Live, online chat is available between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. EST (13:00 and 23:00 UTC) at http://opensrs.com/manage. A live person will respond to your chat request within 20 seconds.

Those objectives are measurable and clear. We either meet or exceed those standards, or we don’t. If we don’t, we’ll address the reasons why so that we can again consistently meet and improve on them. More importantly, we think that making this commitment is just our starting point. Our intention is to provide you with the best service in the industry. Not just better support. The best. And every time we make it “better”, it is just a next step to best.

We want to share more with you

That’s a lot to digest in a blog post. We want to tell you more, and get into some of the details and thinking around what’s happening with Reseller Support.

We’re inviting you to attend the webinar we’re hosting on Tuesday, December 11 at 11:00 a.m. EST (16:00 UTC) to get some more in-depth information about what we’re doing to make Reseller Support better.

It will be an open and honest discussion about Reseller Support with a view to the future described above.

We hope you can attend and even if you can’t view it live, register for the event anyways and you’ll automatically get the reminders and a follow-up email with the details on where the recorded version can be viewed.

You can register here.

goMobi v1.8 to be released on December 17, 2012

Posted: 10 Dec 2012 04:15 AM PST

On December 17, 2012, goMobi plans to release v.18 of the goMobi mobile website service.

Like all goMobi releases, there’s nothing you need to do as a reseller or goMobi customer. New features will automatically show up for all users on the release date as goMobi updates the application on its servers.

New Features

Version 1.8 brings a long list of new features including a new Site Navigation Menu bar, Google+ integration, the ability to hide features from the homepage and more. Additionally, this release addresses EU Cookie regulations.

More information

More information and a rundown of specific changes that are part of this goMobi release can be found in the OpenSRS Help & Support site.

jueves, 6 de diciembre de 2012

Announcing Taste of Ting

Posted: 05 Dec 2012 10:43 AM PST

One of the biggest requests we’ve heard from potential Ting resellers is an interest in trying out Ting before recommending it to clients. We think that’s a great idea! We now have 10 HTC EVO 4G LTE phones to ship out for a 30-day trial. We’re even including a $25 service credit to help you get started and to test out the network in your area. Plus, you’ll see how great the Ting user experience is, from the online tools to the help forums to the customer support.

To get started, click on over to www.opensrs.com/tasteofting to sign up. We’ll let you know once a device is ready.

Update: the first batch of devices will be going out next week.

sábado, 1 de diciembre de 2012

Verisign and the US Department of Commerce – Our Take

Posted: 30 Nov 2012 12:16 PM PST

This morning, it was announced that Verisign and the US Department of Commerce had come to an agreement that allows Verisign to continue to operate the .com domain for another six years.

What was missing from that contract was the hot topic of conversation this morning – Verisign no longer has the right to four price increases of 7% over the term of the agreement. In other words, .com domains will likely remain prices at $7.85 until November, 2018 when the new agreement comes up for renewal again.

Verisign does have the right to increase prices if they can prove “extraordinary” expense resulting from and attack or threat of attack on the security or stability of the DNS. Any price increase would require Verisign to prove that the increase served the public interest before the Department of Commerce would approve.

Verisign could also seek a price increase if it could prove that market conditions no longer warranted the new restrictions that are put in place with this agreement. Again, that would require Department of Commerce approval.

Tucows’ Take

Elliot Noss, Tucows President and CEO, says that the new agreement between the Department of Commerce and Verisign “rights a wrong in the last contract.”

Tucows has been very outspoken about .com pricing, and we were clear at the time of the last renewal that we did not believe Verisign should have been given the right to price increases.

It’s good news for registrants and the Internet as a whole.

Elliot also suggests that the new contract could even turn out to be good for Verisign going forward. The previous contract provided them with an opportunity to raise prices. As a public company with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value, Elliot notes that investors, who often think in the short term, would put immense pressure on Verisign to exercise those price increases.

He goes on to suggest that having the option to raise prices four times in the next six years may have turned into a competitive disadvantage for Verisign given the new gTLDs coming online within the next 12 to 18 months.

By not having price increases available to them as a way to grow revenues, Verisign is will be driven to more efficiency and innovation. Certainly, the conference call Verisign hosted this morning featured a lot of talk of innovation, patents, and the addition of new value-added and revenue generating services like Distributed Denial of Service attack protection.

One thing is for sure, and perhaps this is the most important part of the contract extension announcement: Verisign continuing to be the operator of the .com extension for the next six years is great news for everyone. Verisign has proven itself to be an exceptionally good operator of the root. From a technology and service perspective, .com is clearly in good hands.

You can read the US Department of Commerce statement here.

[cross posted from the Tucows blog]

viernes, 30 de noviembre de 2012

We really want to know how we’re doing…so we’re going to start asking

Posted: 29 Nov 2012 11:20 AM PST

Last year, we began to ask you a simple question on a quarterly basis: “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely is it that you would recommend OpenSRS to a friend or colleague?” This was a global survey that related to OpenSRS as a whole.

This one simple question is the cornerstone of the Net Promoter Score model currently in use with many global brands and industry leaders such as Intuit, Zappos and Apple.

Starting on December 4, 2012, you will be asked to answer this question after every interaction you have with Reseller Support.

Your answer to the question will provide us with valuable feedback concerning how you feel about your interactions with Reseller Support, whether it is by phone, email or chat.

Why are we doing this?

To identify what we do well
To find out where we are coming up short
To follow up and fix issues in a timely manner when things go off the rails
To give you a chance to voice your opinion and help us improve future support interactions

How will it work?

Beginning December 4, 2012, you will start to receive an email a few hours after your support request is closed.

This email will ask that one simple question: “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely is it that you would recommend OpenSRS to a friend or colleague?” based on your most recent support request. It will also provide a free form text field for any comments you may wish to add. We ask that you score the support interaction and provide any relevant comments.

We understand (based on feedback from past surveys) that the question seems a bit odd to some of you. Putting aside the notion that you’d be suggesting that someone start a business that might be in direct competition with you, we ask that you consider it hypothetically and honestly. Assuming it would have no impact on your own business and you would like the other person to be successful, would you suggest to them that they use OpenSRS?

What happens to the data?

Management or support staff will review each and every response. Depending on the your response, follow up communication may occur.

Thanks in advance for your help and honest responses. We really do value your opinions and we look forward to providing an improved support experience to you.

miércoles, 28 de noviembre de 2012

New Webmail Transition Update

Posted: 27 Nov 2012 10:27 AM PST

It’s been about three weeks since all users of OpenSRS Email Service were moved to the latest version of our webmail application.

Since the switchover, we’ve heard some great feedback from you and your customers. We know from experience that users are generally resistant to change, so we always go into these webmail upgrades with a bit of trepidation. Forcing change on people who might not immediately see the benefit can result in some unpleasant feelings for the users, and often has an impact on you and your support staff as users are supported through the change.

As hard as change can be, we knew that webmail was getting a bit long in the tooth and the new version brings some ease-of-use features and other changes that we feel makes it worth the effort.

Thanks for the great feedback

As mentioned, we’ve received great feedback over the last few months when the new webmail was first made available to users. Now that we have many more people using webmail as the default, we’ve identified a few bugs that weren’t exposed in the months of limited release and by our extensive internal testing. Some of the minor bugs (small visual or usability issues) have already been fixed.

We’ve also learned about some bigger issues including things like a printing bug that was discovered in certain situations when using IE8, some problems with Scandinavian language display, and a visual issue with the Address Book when performing certain tasks. Additionally, we’ve identified some performance and speed issues in certain circumstances.

Our development and operations teams are working hard to fix these bugs and issues – fixes will be implemented in a matter of days in some cases, and over the next few weeks in other cases. Overall speed and performance is something that we are continually working to improve and we’ve made that a high priority in the near term.

Let us know what you think

Thanks again for the feedback – keep it coming! Drop by the Help & Support site and let us know what you or your users are seeing (good and bad), or get in touch with Support via email or phone.

lunes, 26 de noviembre de 2012

December ccTLD-of-the-Week

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 04:13 AM PST

We’re bringing back some past favourites this month, plus discounting an obvious choice for the Christmas holiday week: .CX from the Christmas Islands.

December ccTLDs-of-the-Week:

ccTLD	Dates	Details	Cost/year
.ST	Nov 26 – Dec 2	Sao Tome and Principe	$13/year (normally $45)
.IM	Dec 3 – Dec 9	Isle of Man	$8/year (normally $15)
.LV	Dec 10 – Dec 16	Latvia	$15/year (normally $30)
.SO	Dec 17 – Dec 23	Somalia	$10/year (normally $20)
.CX	Dec 24 – Dec 30	Christmas Islands	$25/year (normally $35)

miércoles, 21 de noviembre de 2012

Happy Thanksgiving to our US Friends

Posted: 21 Nov 2012 05:10 AM PST

Thursday, November 22, 2012 is Thanksgiving Day in the US. While we’re definitely thankful for a multitude of various things up here in Canada where OpenSRS is based, tomorrow is not a holiday for us. As a result, we’ll be staffed as usual in all departments.

We wish our American friends a Happy Thanksgiving and we hope you have an enjoyable day of rest and relaxation with family and friends.

martes, 20 de noviembre de 2012

Embeddable Ting Savings Calculator

Posted: 20 Nov 2012 07:26 AM PST

Here is an easier way to tell your customers about Ting and demonstrate the savings they can receive. Use our embeddable savings calculator on your own site. We’ve taken out links back to Ting.com, so all you need to do is show a link/banner with your referral code to direct people to the Ting site.

Here is the embed code:

If you don't know what to do with that (or have any problems) and you would like to have a Ting savings calculator on your site, we are happy to help. Just comment here and we will have someone geeky get back to you.

martes, 30 de octubre de 2012

New .ASIA domain promotion

Posted: 29 Oct 2012 10:08 AM PDT

Starting on November 1 and continuing through to the end of the year, .ASIA domains will be on sale at a registry cost of just $1.99. Considering the usual registry cost for .ASIA is $10, it’s a pretty great deal.

Like most OpenSRS promotions, you’ll need to sign up to take advantage of the savings and do a little promotion of .ASIA domains. That can be done with something like a banner on your website, or through an email to your customers.

Continuing Promotions

We have a few other promos still ongoing as well – .MOBI, .INFO and .PRO are all on sale, as is .ORG. You can always view current promotions on our website.

lunes, 22 de octubre de 2012

OpenSRS Help & Support

Posted: 22 Oct 2012 07:50 AM PDT

If you’ve opened a ticket with us in the past week or so, then you’ve probably already noticed something new. We recently transitioned to a new platform for OpenSRS Help and Support.

The cutover went quite smoothly. The new ticket system for Reseller Support offers some great new things for you – ticket history, the ability to view and update tickets via the web (and on mobile devices), and a clean new look and feel.

New Forums, Knowledge Bases and Announcements Sections

Along with the new ticketing system comes new Community Forums, Knowledge Bases and Announcements sections.

The new forums are integrated into the ticketing system now and we have the ability to promote forum posts into tickets when it makes sense. Our goal is to give you more support options – email, phone, public forums, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

You’ll also note a new “Feature Requests” forum. This one operates a bit differently and allows you to make a request for something you’d like to see from OpenSRS, and vote on requests that have been made. We don’t promise to add every new feature that’s requested, but we do pledge to consider each and every one thoughtfully. It’s visible only when you are logged in to the OpenSRS Help & Support site.

The Knowledge Bases (for services and integration) are a bit on the empty side right now, but we’ll be filling those up with articles and content over the next few weeks. Feel free to suggest articles to us. We expect this to become a significant resource for our Resellers and it’s something we’ve wanted to provide for a long time.

We’ve created an Announcements section as well. That will be home to things like Incident Reports, service release notes, Maintenance notifications, support updates (like holiday hours) and any other bits of info we need to pass along to you. Some of these areas are only visible to logged in users.

A couple of notes

You’ll have to create a new login for OpenSRS Help & Support. We’re working on integrating your Reseller account login with this support site, but until we have support on the OpenSRS side for multiple logins for a single Reseller account (coming soon!), we’re going to keep things separate.
Those of you who already had forum accounts, sorry…you’ll need to create a new account (which will also function as your Reseller Support account). We’ve shut off posting on the old forums, but we’ll leave that content up in a “read-only” state for now in case you want to reference anything.

Take a look!

We invite you to head over and create an account today. Please feel free to provide any feedback in the General forum – we’re committed to making this a great resource site for you. Let us know what works and what doesn’t and provide us with suggestions on Knowledge Base articles and other ways we can provide better support.

sábado, 20 de octubre de 2012

OpenSRS Email Cluster B Migration Update – October 19

Posted: 19 Oct 2012 11:43 AM PDT

The migration of customer mailboxes off the troubled storage infrastructure to the new NAS clusters continues as expected.

We’re pleased to report that the migration of customer mailboxes from the specific head that was causing the issues on Email Cluster B is nearly complete, within the expected timeframe noted in our previous update. A very small percentage (~5%) of customer mailboxes remain and we expect that migration to be completed shortly.

Migrations of remaining customer mailboxes to the new storage infrastructure will begin immediately following. Those mailboxes represent 55% of the total mailboxes which were stored on the troubled infrastructure, but all of these mailboxes are stored on the “good” head that hasn’t been the cause of any issues.

The timeline for the completion of the full migration of customer mailboxes onto the new hardware remains the same – early to mid-November.

We’ll have a further update within 7 to 10 days, or as milestones are reached.

viernes, 19 de octubre de 2012

Take your business global because that is where the market is going

Posted: 18 Oct 2012 08:52 AM PDT

Editor’s Note: This is the latest in a series of guest posts by Phil Shih, founder of Structure Research.

The hosting business has shown exemplary growth since its inception in the 90s. Surging Internet adoption and the larger shift to communicating, collaborating and conducting business online guaranteed that hosters would have plenty of addressable market. The shift to outsourcing infrastructure rather than housing it on-premise was another key driver.

The market is still healthy. There continue to be businesses that need an online presence and there are plenty of organizations that use hosting for email or document management or lease servers to run applications or archive files. But it is also fair to say that the low-hanging fruit is not as plentiful as it once was. Having a personal website is still something people want to use hosting for but there are other outlets now. Facebook is perhaps the best example of a plausible alternative to web hosting and there is no shortage of free hosting services that similarly attract customers previously targeted by hosters.

Maturation can mean shrinkage

The fact is that as an industry grows and matures competition tightens and the total addressable market tends to shrink. To frame the problem at its core: with less new Internet adopters and growing numbers of outsourced hosting users along with more alternatives there are less people and businesses for hosters to sell to.

There are plenty of ways for hosters to address this dilemma. They can move up-market into other infrastructure services or add value around the domain name, hosting and email "triple play". But it is imperative that hosters start looking at easy ways to expand their total addressable market and the most logical thing is to start moving into emerging markets. In places like Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, China, Indonesia and Russia – to name a few – the Internet is just starting to take off and there is a huge untapped market of users that is moving online. They represent prime candidates for business-class domain names, hosting and email.

Check the facts

Consider some of the numbers. In VeriSign's last domain industry brief, Brazil and China were among the three fastest-growing ccTLDs on a q/q basis. In that same period total ccTLD registrations were up 5.4% q/q. Takeaway? There is clearly new and accelerating Internet adoption coming from all corners of the world and many of them can be found in emerging markets.

Contrary to common perception moving into new markets is also not hard to do. It certainly is not as hard as it was even five years ago. Country-code top-level domains are readily available on a wholesale basis and setting up a small hosting operation is as easy as leasing a few servers or taking down a small colocation suite. Automation, remote management and software portability make location a relatively minor issue. The main challenge for the hoster will be to hire some local language support staff, which is plentiful and easy to find in emerging markets at an affordable cost.

Still a healthy sector

It is worth reiterating: the hosting sector is healthy and continues to grow even in the most mature markets. While things are getting tougher there is still plenty of runway and upside. The tailwinds behind the sector are favourable. But as the market continues to mature hosters would be wise to start looking for opportunities that offset the structural challenges that will have an increasing impact over time. Hedging your bets and expanding addressable market is the path to long-term success. Take advantage of the fact the Internet is borderless and take your hosting business global.

viernes, 12 de octubre de 2012

OpenSRS Email Cluster B Migration Update

Posted: 11 Oct 2012 12:54 PM PDT

We want to provide an update on our effort to restore the level of service that you and your customers had become accustomed to prior to the recent outages affecting OpenSRS Email Cluster B.

As mentioned in the Incident Report for the latest degradation of service, we've begun moving customer mailboxes off the troubled storage infrastructure and onto the new hardware (NAS).

Current Migration Status:

At this point, about 20% of the total customer mailboxes that were on the troubled storage infrastructure have been moved over to the new NAS cluster(s). When you count only customer mailboxes located on the specific head that was failing and causing the degradation of service, that percentage of customer mailboxes moved is about 40%.

We're focused on first moving all customer mailboxes on the head that was specifically causing all the issues. Once those customer mailboxes are moved, we'll continue with customer mailboxes located on the other head. It's worth noting that all new accounts are being provisioned directly onto the new NAS hardware.

Next Steps:

We're continuing to migrate the remaining customer mailboxes off the affected hardware as quickly as possible.

Those migrations are being done in a very measured way to ensure that we maintain the high level of service and availability that we aim to provide. The speed at which we can migrate customer mailboxes is dictated by the load on the Cluster at any given time. We're throttling the migration process to move customer mailboxes as quickly as possible, with as little risk as possible.

Additional hardware to create two further NAS clusters has now been installed and is ready to enter service. Once the first NAS cluster is at capacity, we'll begin migrating customer mailboxes to the second NAS cluster, followed by the third, as each NAS cluster is filled to approximately 40% of the rated capacity (what we consider "full").

It's important to note that as we move customer mailboxes off the troubled hardware, we also reduce the overall load on it. We expect that the decrease in load on the troubled storage infrastructure will lead to improved reliability for those customer mailboxes still on that storage system.

Migrations of customer mailboxes will continue over the coming weeks. We estimate that all customer mailboxes will be migrated off the older hardware sometime late next week (October 18-20). The remaining customer mailboxes on the other head will be moved off after that and we estimate all customer mailboxes will be off the problematic hardware sometime in early to mid-November.

We'll provide further updates on our progress until we have all customer mailboxes migrated. Our aim is to keep you in the loop with posts at least every week to ten days and as we reach significant milestones.