M6 webhosting and e-mail hosting

I am a web designer and as such need to host sites and e-mails for clients. M6.net does not see a problem with e-mails taking 24-48 and even 72 hours, yes hours to be processed through their servers. When you try to contact them through a control panel - it is a crap shoot whether it will work or not. When you call 1-866-496-6638 half of the time you get "Please leave message" and then a beep and then it hangs up in less then four seconds. If I didn't pay for one year in advance, I would pull all sites from M6 to any other hosting company.

On top of everything else they use smarter mail for e-mails and the following is an excerpt form smartermail's website http://www.smartertools.com/Products/SmarterMail/CaseStudy.aspx

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One company that recently had to make a decision regarding their mail offerings and email solutions was M6.Net, a fast growing, multi-account hosting provider for the Microsoft Windows platform. Facing the prospect of losing customers due to email stability and reliability issues after an upgrade to an industry-leading mail server solution, M6.Net came to the realization that they had to make a change, and make a change quickly. They spent well over 9 months of serious, low level debugging and testing of their previous solution without finding any resolution to their situation, and received little assistance or support from the vendor, other than hearing that we were doing something wrong. It subsequently became the top priority project at M6.Net to find a total long-term solution to their email woes.

After an initial request for information from SmarterTools regarding SmarterMail, SmarterTools was able to discuss the options M6.Net had regarding mail, and was able to provide a solution that met, or surpassed, each and every one of the requirements M6.Net presented. In particular, M6.Net wanted a responsive and helpful support structure for the email application, they wanted a solution that was easy to manage and maintain, and they wanted an application that would provide the highest level of stability and reliability, in addition to a feature set beyond what was currently available, that would allow them to retain and satisfy the 20,000 users currently utilizing M6.Net for their hosting needs.

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Let me tell you something I was being hosted when they where fixing the problem and it was never as bad as it is now. I am guessing that M6 has a policy of "Load balancing" with bulk e-mailling being on the same server as companies who may at a maximum sent 100 emails a day. This is not good for a company who relies on time for answering e-mails.

I have also lost many test e-mails that I have sent through the system when things don't seem to be going right. My partner got a telephone call from someone who regularly e-mailled him that he tried to send him bidding information for a $30,000 contract but my partner never received it. The e-mail was not bounced back or anything. If the person was not an aquaintence we would never have known of the problem and of the potential loss of $30,000 in income, -- if we are to loose a bid, at least let us bid.

The latest problem was with ftp, they changed their DNS information and all of a sudden the ftp doesn't work (I don't know if they two are related but give them the benifit of the doubt), I tried calling but to no avail, I waited 24 hours just in case dns information needed to be updated and tried again, and it still wasn't working, then at 11:00 am my time I called and tried to leave a message, e-mailled, faxed, used the control panel support request, because I was trying to update a couple of sites and I couldn't. at 8:53pm my time I received an e-mail from M6 and the following was their response

"Hi Daniel,

The issue now looks to be resolved, if you''re still having any problems please let us know.

Gavan

M6.Net Support

9 and a half hours to get the ftp working and if it didn't work (which has happened many times in the past) I am stuck going through another session of e-mail - calling - faxing - control panel to get their attention. The only good thing I have to say about M6 is - if Gavan is the one fixing the problem it normally is fixed properly. Other than that I have nothing good to say about M6.net

Daniel Lambert

Email User