Service Provider VentraIP Switches To Axigen To Fix Scaling Issues And Improve Customer Experience

About VentraIP

VentraIP is the largest privately owned web host and domain name registrar in Australia. For the past 10 years, its 80 person team consisting of industry veterans and local technical professionals ensured their customers always got the best customer service and technical support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Now, VentraIP’s goal is to scale their business by providing top tier support and solutions. They do this by incorporating the newest technologies and creating new products to help their customers and their businesses.

The business goals | Keeping up with market standards and demands

For the past 5 years, VentraIP used Atmail as the dedicated email solution. But as their business goals changed, they felt the need for rapid scaling, more flexibility and security, along with the possibility to migrate customers between servers. All this made the company consider another email server solution.

Main technical day-to-day frustrations that needed to be solved to be able to remain a top player on the market:

• licenses were expiring at different times, and when any of them expired, all services on the server would stop;
• scaling was a real issue as there was no easy way to migrate customers between servers;
• new features were implemented at a very slow speed, which meant competitors were stealing VentraIP’s customers because they could offer more value;
• security was also an issue because DKIM was not implemented;
• lack of good support from Atmail.

“At Atmail, it could take weeks/months to have the simplest thing looked at. Bugs were rampant, and getting them fixed was incredibly infuriating and time-consuming. A lot of the things that were problems were not even realized as problems because it was a case of ‘it’s the way it’s always been,’ instead of finding a proper solution” - Bradley Silverman - Senior Technical Operations.

Besides support, the lack of a clustering solution was also posing problems. Each server was standalone, so management and maintenance were time-consuming. Servers would eventually fill up, and migrating customers between nodes was a headache. As a workaround, VentraIP left servers at ~50% capacity, wasting resources. But due to customers always storing all emails, eventually, even these would fill up, so this was not a long-term solution.

Last but not least, VentraIP’s customers found the Webmail interface outdated and very hard to navigate, which led to a lot of support tickets.

All these shortcomings made VentraIP consider numerous solutions (MailEnable, Zimbra, KerioConnect, iRedMail, Mailcow, are just a few). Fortunately, they found all they were looking for in Axigen Mail Server.

The decision process | Why Axigen was the best Atmail alternative for VentraIP

VentraIP had a clear set of objectives they wanted to meet:

• price - they were happy to spend more than with Atmail, but the pricing had to be viable long-term;
• scalability;
• reliability;
• history - they wanted a product that had been on the market for a while;
• security;
• performance;
• support;
• usability.

The decision process involved all departments: “Most of the business had a say really. Technical Operations put in some suggestions, though ultimately, I found the majority. Development had some decisions as ease of integrating into our systems was a major factor (having an API). Support had a say as they would need to be able to use it and help customers use it. Management, of course, as they would foot the bill and had to make sure it aligned with their goals for the company” - Bradley Silverman - Senior Technical Operations.

In the end, they found that Axigen Mail Server meets all their goals, while also having growth potential. The top 3 reasons that made VentraIP choose our solution were:

1. Performance - servers can perform impeccably even with thousands of accounts per server;
2. Scalability - the ability to add more servers to a cluster at will and moving accounts between backends;
3. Support - issues are dealt with swiftly.

“Axigen’s support is second to none. Issues, feature requests, bugs are all addressed / added / fixed in record time. Having fantastic support is just so important to us because if something breaks, the fallout for our customers is huge. Email is too vital to have any downtime” - Bradley Silverman - Senior Technical Operations.

The solution | Building the new Axigen cluster

This article was first seen here. Head over to the Axigen website to read the rest of the case study.